Contemporary Spanish American Novelists' Theory of the Novel

THE CONTEMPORARY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVELISTS' THEORY OF THE NOVEL

ERNEST JACKSON LUNSFOKLs JR.

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE CPADUATE CO'JNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OE FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMEf.'T OF ^HE RECJiREKLNTS FOR T.S'L DEGREE Oi- DOCTOR OF PHIIOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

1974 Copyright

By .

Ernest Jackson Lunsford, Jr.

1974 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the members of my express .ay appreciation to 1 would like to Bushnoll, Irving R. Wershow and David committee, Drs. Ivan A. Schulman, Special thanks preparation of this dissertation. for their help in the in my research Wershow. who guided and directed rne go to Drs. Schulmon and

and writing. FORFWORD

This dissertation represents an attenipt to give substance ?nd

I'nity to the disparate theoretical ideas on the novel expressed in the writings of contemporary Spanish Ainorican novelists. These concepts are contained in books, essays, interviews, ragazine articles, and, in several cases, in the author's fictional works. We will structure these thecretical positions to form meaningful similar or divergent ideas.

Ihe term "corrtemporary novel ' is not used in this study to denote any single specific esthetic or ideological concept of the novel, b'jt rather to embrace the numerous forms of the riovel of the last throe decades, beginning with Agustfn Yanez's Al^ fi^jo del a_gua (IS'/l/), Generally recognized as ttie beginning of a new direction in the Spanish /.merican novel. The authors dealt with in our study are all alive and still writing, with thie exceptions of Jose Mar-ta Arguedas and Miguel Anuel

Asturias, the latter of whom died during the period of the preparation cf this dissertation, in June 1974.

IV TABLF OF CONTfNTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

FOREWORD iv

ABSTRACT : vii

CHAPTER

I ASPECTS AND CHARACTERISTICS Of THE TRADITIONAL AND THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 1

The Decline of the ReaiistiCs Bourgeois Novel and the Epic Narrative "1 The Transformation of Latin American Society 4 The Difficulty of the Contemporary Novelist's Role 8 Exile 9 Universality Versus Nationalism 14 Models and Forerunners of the Contemporary Spanish /^jiierican Novel 22 Elements and Characteristics of the Contemporary Spanish American Novel 25 Notes 35

II LANGUAGE AND THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 39

The Need for a New Language 39 Forerunners of the Linguistic Insurrection 51 Characteristics of the New Language 54 The Baroque Tendency Versus Simple, Straightforward Language; "Beauty" in Language 64 Experimentation with Language 73 Notes 81

III FORI^, TECHNIQUE AND STYLE IN THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL . . 85

The "Total" Novel: the "Open" Novel 85 Technique 93 The Blurring of Genres 108 Ambiguity Ill Style 114 Notes 121 .IV REALITY AND THE- NOVEL . 125

The Nature of Reality 1n the Contemporary NoveT .... 125 The Novelist as Witness to His Society 135

Conmitment...... •...... 142

The Social Novel ; the Psychological Novel ...... 151 The Novel of Ideas; the Metaphysical. Novel...... 157 The Urban Novel 160

Alienation. . . . 162 The Difficult, Obscure, Complex Novel ...... 164 '. Themes...... 167 Notes 170

V TIME AND MYTH IN THE NOVEL...... 176

Time...... 176 • Myth...... ; . . 179 . ... . Notes ...... 186

VI HUMOR AND SEX IN THE NOVEL. 188

Humor 188 Sex ...... 193

Notes ...... ;. 196

VII THE FUTURE OF THE .NOVEL ! 197

Notes ...... I. . 202

.' BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... v .i...... 203

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH...... 209

vi Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

THE CONTEMPORARY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVELISTS' THEORY

. OF THE NOVEL

. By

Ernest Jackson Lunsford, Jr.

August, 1974

.Chairman: Ivan A. Schulman Major Department: Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish)

This dissertation provides a cohesive overview of the theory of .

the contemporary novel as expressed by today's novelists of Spanish

America. By "contemporary," we do not intend to indicate any rigid

esthetic definition, but simply to restrict our study to the novels

which have. appeared since 1947, the publication date of Agusttn Y^nez's

Al filo del agua . This work is generally considered to signal a new

direction in the Spanish American novel, and so it provides us with

a convenient starting date.

The sources for our study are multiple. Much of the material is

drawn. from interviews with the various novelists, published in periodi-

cals and in book form. Some of the novelists have written theoretical

studies on the novel. In certain cases, novelists have included

theoretical material within the texts of their novels. We have

arranged the material by themes, iri order to present a logical develop-

ment of such highly diversified material.

vn In the introductory chapter, we look at the decline of the realistic, bourgeois novel. The difficulty of the contemporary writer's role in a developing society is examined, particularly the problem of authors living outside their country. The related problem of universality versus nationalism in the novel is examined. Then we define in general terms both the novel as a genre and the contemporary novel of Spanish America.

The second chapter deals with language. The "linguistic insurrection" is at the core of the contemporary novel of Spanish America. The need for a new language as expressed by the novelists is examined first, followed by a brief study of forerunners of the linguistic insurrection.

The characteristics of the new language are studied, along with the opposing tendencies toward the baroque and a simple, straightforward style. The chapter ends with a section on experimentation with language.

Chapter III deals with form in the contemporary novel. Such concepts as thetotal novel, the open novel and the epic novel are, seen as goals, along with the many techniques employed by the novelists to attain those goals. The tendency toward the blurring of genres, ambiguity and a study of novelistic styles are also included.

In Chapter IV, the nature of reality is defined by the novelists as going beyond the everyday, tangible reality to a comprehensive, "marvelous" view of reality, leading to magic realism. The social and psychological, aspects of the novel are examined as manifestations of this subjective reality. The novelist's role as a witness to his society and his commitment to social and political points of view are studied. The chapter also looks at the urban novel and its accompanying theme of man's

vi i i alienation, the tendency toward a difficult and complex novel, and the novel as a vehicle for metaphysical investigation.

The fifth chapter investigates time and myth in the novel. Although these are ^ery important elements in the contemporary novel, they con- sume surprisingly little space in the novelists' theoretical writings.

Chapter VI deals with humor and sex— two topics which several novelists feel should play greater roles in today's novels than they presently do. Both are gaining ground today, but still seem to be taboo with many novelists.

Our final chapter points toward possible future directions the

Spanish American novel may take— directions hinted at by the novelists themselves. We come to no broad conclusions, since the novel istic theory v;e deal with is highly diversified in content, subject and major thrust. It is open-ended like the concept of the open novel itself, and is sure to continue evolving as new novels appear and as the novelists rethink their positions.

IX CHAPTER I

ASPECTS AND. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TRADITIONAL AND THE' CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

The Decline of the Realistic, Bourgeois NoveV and t he Epic Narrative

It has been widely stated that the novel is in a state of crisis, or alternately, that the novel is dead as an art form. This is allegedly true for Spanish America as well as the rest of the Western world. The

Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, in developing his ideas on the novel, • summarizes one such thesis— that of Alberto Moravia. The Italian critic contends that the novel's themes, characters, techniques and situations, of bourgeois origins, have been superseded in terms of their mass appeal, by television, the movies, the press, psychoanalysis and sociology. The two great types of novels— those dealing with customs and those dealing with human psychology— have already been exhausted, the former by

Flaubert, and the latter by Proust and Joyce, the bourgeoisie, v/hdse dominant life-style nurtured the novel, is in decline according to this theory, and thus, the novel as well. The novelist can only be a witness- to this process of decadence leading to noia, tedium, boredom and indifference.^

Fuentes rejects Moravia's thesis, first, because the Mexican novelist believes such early prototypical narratives as those of Boccaccio, the

Thousand and One Nights or the medieva.T novels of chivalry disprove the theory of the novel's bourgeois beginnings (although Fuentes concedes that

1 ^ ^

the novel's major development has coincided with the rise and triumph of the middle class and its dialectic of individual enterprise). In countering Moravia's arguments, Fuentes insists that what is dead is not the novel, but the bourgeois form of the novel, i.e., a descriptive, psychological,, critical form of observing personal and social relations in the Flaubertian style. But Fuentes insists that the death of this realism in no way means that the raw material of literary rea 1 i ty has died with it. In fact, he sees new trends in literature as opening a wider, a more all-inclusive window on reality, redefining the nature of reality (as we shall see in Chapter IV). Realism as Flaubert, Perez

Waldos or Manuel Galvez knew it may be dead, or exhausted, but the novel remains a viable genre.

.Let us look briefly at the "traditional"'* Spanish American hovel, in, order to better understand the background out of which today's contemporary novel has arisen. The traditional novel of Spanish America folTcwed very closely the prevailing European literary styles, but generally with one salient difference: geography and nature tended to be not so much the background for this literature as the foreground— the theme and even the protagonist. Every student of the novel knows that the traditional novel of these countries tended to be an epic depletion of the struggle' between man and nature, a struggle immortalized in

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's classic depiction of the urban forces of civilization versus the rural forces of ignorance and barba»*ism.

Civil izaci6n ^ barbarie ( Facundo ). In "these novels, man and nature were generally prototypes, symbolic representations of an idea or a point of view, and not well -developed, "rounded" characters whose life experience was revealed as: the novel progressed. Thus, in Rdmulo Gal legos' classic

novel of antithesis. Dona Barbara , Santos Luzardo is the symbolic embodiment' of the city, its civilization, its education and the enlight- enment the landholders could create in Venezuela if they would dedicate themselves to the principles and ideals represented by Santos Luzardo..

Dona Bcirbara, Luzardo's antithesis, is the embodiment of the primitive, rural Venezuela— passionate, vindictive, uneducated, strong-willed, un- principled, a symbol of the ignorance and feudalism which, together with the forces of right and reason, constitute an antagonistic and syncretic culture.

The first hundred years of the novel constitute a Spanish American geographical epic, involving the process of self-discovery and cultural identification, the novel, following European literary modes, incorporated Hispanic costumbrismo, regionalism, realism and naturalism in its classic, traditional works: Jos^ Eustasio Rivera's La Vorggine (1924),

Ricardo Guiraldes' Don Segundo Sombra (1926), Rdmulo Gal Tegos ' Dona

Barbara (T929), Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1934), Giro Alegrfa's El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941). While social and psychological problems also appear in these novels, character portrayal, remains a secondary concern and fundamentally symbolic in nature. • Thus, the traditional novel has

given us many memorable types , but few multidimensional characters .

In this regard, as Carlos Fuentes notes, the traditional Spcinish

American novel was more concerned with the relation betv/een the physical environment and man than with man' himself.^ Amazed at and intimidated by the splendor and majesty of the continent's immense jungles, rivers, plains and mountains, the novelist tended to become a chronicler. transfixed like the first cronistas by the natural wonders around him,

itsnd too preoccupied by pressing social and economic issues to portray

the human elements. of this New World in any other than a symbolic

formulation tied to a geographic or socio-political thesis. While

considerable attention was given to the depiction of regional or

national customs, the portrayal of the psychological aspects of characters

remained relatively superficial. " Fuentes states that Spanish America

achieved political independence without achieving any true human

identity.^ This is certainly true in the novel. The individual simply did not offer the same attraction as collective man within his geographic

context.

this schematic overview of the traditional Spanish American novel will serve to place the contemporary novel in Spanish America in a

contrastive perspective. ,

The Transformation of Latin American Society

The breakdown of the novel's old realistic approach is directly related to the breakdov/n of the old reality. Carlos Fuentes attributes the major restructuring of twentieth-century Latin American society to • one basic cause (while admitting others); United States capitalism.

Large investments in both industry (urban) and agriculture (rural) brought about a precipitous breakdown of the traditional Latin American social and economic patterns—mechanization, modern agricultural methods,, agrarian reform, a massive flight to the cities and subsequent explosive growth in the urban areas. Latin America has taken one giant leap from the simplicity and order of a neo- feudal istic society to the nerve- jangling complexity and chaos of urban twentieth-century life. The novel, in its constant endeavor to depict man, has understandably undergone drastic changes. Sarmiento's simplistic antithesis "civilization versus barbarism" has scant applicability to contemporary society. Today's social order is in a constant state of flux, one in which the choices and directions are not clear. Latin American man, like his contemporaries around the world, must grope to find his way out of his quandary.

To portray this new and complex society, the novelist finds old literary forms insufficient. As Roa Bastos states, the novelist finds it necessary to seek his expression through new technical, esthetic, linguistic and even ideological modes in order to achieve a more universal view of

Latin America.' As the Mexican poet Octavio Paz declares, the essence of the Latin American experience today is that at last, Latin American man is the contemporary of all men.® This statement coincides precisely v/ith Fuentes' idea that Europe is no longer the only center of occidental culture. Formerly, to be read and applauded in Paris was the dream of every Latin. American writer. But today, with the emergence of the so-^called Third World and the political and military power of the United

States and Russia, Europe has lost its stranglehold as the center of "

"civilization," and that center has been spread out diffusely to many points, no longer easy to pinpoint (just as the concept of "civilization" is no longer as easy to define as it was for Sarmiento). Latin America, formerly relegated to the periphery of world affairs and world culture, suddenly finds that it has as much right to be a "center" of civilization as any other cultural center.' The old hierarchy is gone. The Latin

American novelist is no longer automatically labeled inferior if he does not follow the latest literary trends of Paris or Madrid. Thus, a new

freedom of experimentation and originality is open to; the Spanish

American author. The resultant express-i on is the "new novel" or

"contemporary novel" of the last three decades. Fuentes goes 'on to state that one of the principle tenets of the new novel is the destruction of the old black-and-white polarities and false polemics: realism versus fantasy; "committed" art versus "pure"; art; "national" literature versus "universal" or "cosmopolitan" literature; "social" versus "psychological" novel; as Well as the eternal cjuestion of civilization versus barbarism.*" The introduction of imagination, a thorough house-cleaning of language, and numerous other aspects of the new novel (themes, problems and techniques which we will examine in subsequent chapters) are the tools the novelists use to achieve their goal of expressing a new experience. This experience, as. we have stated, is largely urban and typically complex. As Fuentes points out, the easily grasped right-versus-wrong view of justice depicted in Dona

Bcirbara is far removed from the complex, ambiguous and uncertain view of justice presented in Mario Vargas LI osa's La ciudad y los perros .**

We might add the illustrations of Rivera's La Vor^gine and Gabriel

Garcta Mcirquez's Cien anos de soledad . Both are by Colombian authors and deal with life in the jungles of Colombia, but there is an enormous gulf between them in style, interpretation and intent. The old vision was based on less complex formulations; the reader felt surer, safer, on more solid moral ground. But the new vision (in GarcTa Mcirquez's book), though often perplexing, is a more complete vision of today's conflictive, ambiguous world, and thus more honest and more representative. The increasing urbanization of Latin America has "produced an increasingly urban-oriented novel. The pampa has given way to Buenos

Aires, the Andes and jungle to Lima and Bogota'. As Vargas Llosa points out, the old-style novels dealing with the jungles, the plains and the mountains, were just as exotic to the residents of Latin America's cities as a French novel about Paris, a Spanish novel about Madrid or an American novel about New York. The Latin American born and raised

in a city generally knew nothing of the rural areas of his nation, and . his poor, slum-dv/elling neighbors, immigrants from the countryside, were generally illiterate and did not read these .novels which dealt with their native environment. Thus, the traditional novelist, knowingly or not, was writing a novel exotic in nature to the audience for which it was intended.'^ Hence, the contemporary novelist turns more' and more to the cities of Latin America for settings, characters and situations.

But this should not lead one to think that: nature and geography have been discarded. Far from it. Vargas Llosa, whose first novel La ciudad y los perros is a totally urban novel, turns back to the Peruvian

hinterland and provincial towns for his second novel , La casa verde .

And as he points out, rural areas are also the settings for Juan

Rulfo's Pedro Pgramo , Augusto Roa Bastos' Hijo de hombre and Gabriel

Garcta l^arquez's entire novelistic production, particularly his

masterpiece Cien anos de soledad . Vargas Llosa 'points out that while the locale and the characters in the novels appear to be the same as in the traditional novel's, nature has now' become the backdrop (rather than

the actual protagonist of the novel ) and has been assimilated through mythification, as a ritualistic, integral component of the characters' lives. *^ Nature also plays an. integral part in the Works of two other contemporary novelists— Jose Marta Arguedas of Peru and Miguel Angel

Asturias of Guatemala—v/hose novels delve into the mentality of the large

Indian populations of their respective countries. The Indian, with his animistic beliefs in human relationships with flowers,' trees, rocks, animals and rivers, naturally leads "these two novelists into the countryside and

away from the cities which are so foreign to- the Indian. . But this attempt to portray the Indian mentality constitutes an atypical departure

within the contemporary Spanish American novel , and does not negate the general movement tov/ard urban settings. We should point, out, however, that overtones of the old "civilization versus barbarism" polemic remain

(archetypes die hard) even in sophisticated contemporary novels— one thinks of Asturias' El senor presidente and Alejo Carpentier's Los

pasos perdidos , in which, at least to some extent, the city embodies corruption, tedium and death, and the countryside promises personal freedom, release and Utopia. Yet even El senor presidente and Los pasos perdidos are essentially "urban" novels in terms of their perspective: their protagonists portray a contemporary, urban viewpoint.^^ **

The Difficulty of the Contemporary Novelist's Role "

Although the problems of writing do not constitute one of the dominant themes in the theoreticar works of Spanish America's novelists, some have commented on the subject, specifically the question of an author's position in an ..underdeveloped country, where literature often seems an unnecessary, if not frivolous, profession. Also, many of our novelists speak of the impossibility, or at least the extreme difficulty, of trying to earn a living from writing. Such extraliterary concerns certainly affect the literary works of the novelists.

Carlos Fuentes discusses the situation of the traditional Spanish

American novelist in nations with notorious political instability, lacking a free press, a responsible Congress, or strong labor unions. In such a society, the novelist felt compel led t'o simultaneously play the roles of legislator, reporter, revolutionist and thinker. ^^ He served as the nation's political and social conscience, as official protester of injustices perpetrated against; the poor and the oppressed. While such crusading has not disappeared, it plays a secondary role today, perhaps because there are other (and larger) groups of people in Latin

America who have taken up the banners of social justice. Ernesto

Scibato states that to be a Spanish American writer is to be doubly tormented—not only does one bear the torment of the writer, but additionally the torment of being a Latin American.'^ SSbato goes on to warn that, due to the conditions to which Carlos Fuentes referred

(above), the Spanish American novelist's greatest problem is earning a living from literature without prostituting the art, without "instrumental' izing" it. For Scibato, literature is a sacred act, and to defile it is to defile oneself as an author.^'

Exile

This dileimta of the contemporary novelist's perspective brings us to one of the thorniest problems and one of the most controversial aspects of the situation of today's writers— their frequent "exile" (even the word '"exile" is controversial and is generally rejected by those who live 10

outside their rjatlon). A simple fact of life is that many of today's leading Spanish American novelists live outside their native country," most of them in Europe. The. great majority of the'se have freely chosen to live elsewhere. The problem is that their countrymen criticize this self-imposed "exile," labeling it as "running away ," as cosmopolitanism

(in a negative sense), and even as something closely akin to literary desertion. The fact that such criticism rankles (and that it perhaps does, to some extent, zero in on a point about which these novelists feel at least a small amount of guilt or discomfort) is evidenced by the extensive rebuttals these writers have given to justifying their exile, both in their theoretical expositions and in interviews.

Julio Cortcizar for example rejects the label "exile," stating that he chose to move from Argentina to France, and that he does not feel at all like an exile. He states that the confusion or misunderstanding boils down to a distinction between the author's physical presence in his ov;n nation and his presence as an autho r there. As an illustration he offers the hypothetical case of an Argentine author who writes a novel in Spanish in Tokyo, and has it published in Argentina. That author, he states, has not left Argentina nor abandoned the best that he has to offer, which is his quality as a writer. .Spiritually, that author is not an exile. And that, continues Cort^zar, is his case. He does not need the physical presence of Argentina in order to be able to v.rite.

Yet he states that he feels, lives and thinks "in Argentine," and is wery pleased when the critics say that his novels are profoundly

Argentine. He concludes by affirming that with him, there has been no spiritual uprooting (d esarraigo ), and that his moving to- France was a mere "corporeal displacement."^^ n

Cortcizar bitterly attacks those Argentines who insist that a writer must reside in Argentina in order to be able to write "in Argentine."

He refers to their attitude ironically as demanding "required class attendance." His rebuttal goes to -the following argument: if his novels have met with success and wide reader. acceptance both in Argentina and abroad (as indeed they have), it is in great part due to the fact that his work is both broad and complex. It takes as a point of departure that which is uniquely his, that which arises out of his own inspiration and imagination, and goes on from there to open itself to experiences and influences of the most disparate nature, rejecting nothing as being

"foreign" or "extraneous." Assimilation through a type of literary osmosis is what Cortdzar believes gives his novels the panoramic scope which fascinates the reader. Yet he assimilates this diversity through his own personal (and therefore Argentine) perspective. And he claims, furthermore, that his overview would not be as easy to achieve in

Argentina as in France. Thus, he feels that if he has brought some degree of excellence and originality to the Argentine novel, it has been at least indirectly as a result of his residence abroad. And so, CortSzar remains, and is prepared to remain, a "Latin American writer in France."

In this he sees no paradox nor betrayal of his country, but merely an exercise of personal choice. ^^

Cort^zar, furthermore, raises the question of the literary freedom he enjoys in France, a freedom which he and other Latin American writers might not have in their native countries, with their periodic govern- mental upheavals and repressive regimes. Cortazar escapes all these disruptive circumstances by residing outside the reach of his government's 12

influence.^" (Other writers who have fled from hostile regimes are

Guillermo- Cabrera Infante and Augusto Roa Bastos.)

A different point of view on exile is expressed by Guatemala's

Miguel Angel Asturias. He observes that artists who are particularly sensitive and av/are|of nature, sights and sounds, colors, beauty, feelings, etc., have a natural tendency to lose their appreciation of their natural surroundings through constant exposure' to them: On' the otiier hand, distance gives perspective and sharpens perception. Then the writer "...appreciates the landscape better, sees characters and hears

* sounds more clearly When one returns after a time one finds a new

"^* world Asturias points to a specific example from his own works; he believes that the view of Guatemala he produced in Hombres de mafz and Mu lata de tal is a far deeper, more complete, more essential view of the country than the impressionistic beauty of his earlier Leyendas de

Guatemala . This difference he attributes to his absence from Guatemala for ten or twelve years' before returning to write his more mature works. ^^

Carlos Fuentes draws an interesting comparison between Latin America's major writers living in Europe today and the writers of the United. States'

"lost generation" who lived in Europe between the two World Wars—Henry '

James, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Fuentes points out that these North American writers, in exile, were working a literary revolution which would change forever the course of

American letters. No less so are today's Spanish American exiles revolutionizing the course of Spanish American letters. Fuentes suggests that if the United States had not had its generation of "authors in exile," its literature might have developed within the confines of an intranscend- 13

ental "naturalistic" style at one extreme or an "esthetic" style at the

other. In the light of Fuentes' remarks, it is significant to note that

no one today accuses Hemingway pr Fitzgerald of being "un-American" or

"cosmopolitan" writers in a pejorative sense. The same should and will be

the case in Spanish America if Fuentes has his way. In fact, he claims

that Spanish American literature, if it is not to stagnate through

cultural isolation, must have authors live abroad and write about more

than their own country. The novelist thus opens his vision to a wider

range of possibilities, more variety, which leads to the experimentation

which is at the heart of the contemporary novel. ^^ Fuentes concludes

that the true ideal of Latin American culture and identity should be,

once again, Octavio Paz's affirmation that now Latin American men are

'the contemporaries of all men.^**

The contemporary novelists' discussion of exile is not developed as

a defense, however. They do admit physical exile has drawbacks, though

they consider them minor. CortSzar admits that he fears a gradual

erosion of his feel for conversational Spanish. He feels a loss of

^^ contact with the Spanish language on a constant daily basis.

Asturias similarly concedes that by going away from his country, the

author loses the "pristine inspiration of its auditive, olfactive elements,

"^^ and even the gustative ones, as every country has its own dishes

But. he maintains that the temporary loss of contact with his nation's sights,

sounds, smells and tastes is more than compensated by the writer's gain in

perspective. Both Asturias^' and Colombia's Gabriel Garcfa M5rquez^°

affirm that for them, the ideal solution would be to be able to shuttle

back and forth at will between Europe and Latin America, thus maintaining 14

contact with the spiritual source but at the same time gaining a

critical perspective.

Universality Versus Nationalism

This question of exile among- Spanish America's novelists is vgry directly related to a problem which has plagued Latin American letters from the beginning and has become more prominent in the contemporary

period— the problem of "universal" literature versus "national" literature.

That is, should the writer look outward, toward the situations and

problems of some, theoretical "universal man," or should he concentrate his vision within his own nation, writing about the people who live

there, their social and cultural problems. This thematic conflict has always placed the Spanish American novelist in a traditionally uncom-

fortable position of having to opt for one or the other pole. Carlos

Fuentes points out the consequences which the novelist faces, torn between these two poles: if he takes the "nationalist" path, he in fact straps himself into the outmoded literary forms of realism-naturalism, in addition to automatically limiting his audience almost exclusively to his fellow countrymen, the only public likely to be familiar with and interested

in regional or national themes. If, on the other hand, the novelist prefers the "interhational" or "universal" trend, his recourse is to turn to the

European literary vanguard of his day for style and theme (for as we have noted before, Europe, and particularly Paris, have traditionally been looked upon as the principal source of artistic inspiration). This invariably leads to the v/ould-be "universal" author's being totally ignored by the 15

reading public, both at home and abroad— the former because his novels do not deal with "national" subjects, and the latter because readers abroad see in his works only an unoriginal and slavish imitation of European models. Latin America's much-discussed ''cultural lag" only serves to exacerbate the dilemma of nationalism versus universality.^^

Our discussion of this classic dichotomy is complicated somewhat by the lack of a clear-cut definition of exactly what constitutes a "national" literature. Is there really a "national" literature in each of Spanish

America's twenty nations? Vargas Llosa, for example, denies the existence of twenty coherent, well -formed national literatures in the twenty

Spanish-speaking republics of America. He believes that there is sufficient basis for considering all of Spanish American literature as a whole— a coherent, cohesive body.' He bases this opinion on what he considers a common denominator of historical, cultural and social experiences which give the Spanish American region a definable, though highly diverse, literary personality.^" Gabriel Garcia Mofrquez goes even further, advocating no division between Spanish (peninsular) and

Spanish American literatures. He bases his suggestion oh the fact that, due to a common language and cultural heritage, Don Quixote and the medieval novels of chivalry (for example^ are as much a part of the literairy heritage of Spanish America as they are of Spain. Likewise,

Rub^n Darfo is as much a part of the poetic heritage of Spain as of

Spanish America. ^^ However, despite this evident ambiguity in the definition of what constitutes a "national" literature, normally, one would understand the term to signify a literature that springs from and deals with the social, political, moral and psychological problems, and 16

the common cultural heritage of a given geographical region or a clearly

defined national territory.

On the national ist-universalist polemic, the novelists defend a broad

spectrum of ideas with many blends and shades of distinction. There is a

tendency to regard the conflict as foolish and improperly stated. For

such novelists the terms should not be mutually exclusive, but rather

a synthesis of two desirable positions.

Attacking the old idea of national literature, Ernesto Soibato sounds

a call that is echoed by many of today's novelists: in order for a

literature to be national, it does not have to be a realistic or pseudo-

realistic portrayal of life in one's country. Nor does it have to be a

"picturesque" literature, depicting in colorful, charming vignettes domestic tranquillity and happiness in the manner of the nineteenth-century

costumbristas . Nor does it have the obligation of being clear, concise,

simple, and easily grasped by the average reader. Literature can be

"national" if it is subjective, difficult, complicated, introspective, gloomy, and critical of its own country, even seemingly antinationalistic.

A nation is infinitely complex and impossible to understand in clear and easy terms and categories, so why, insists SSbato, should a literature that aspires to capture the essences of that nation not be equally complex and varied? SIbato believes that, taking Argentina for example, many. novels' and many novelists will be necessary before anything approaching a complete, view of Argentina's chaotic, entangled, contradictory reality can be achieved through literature— that is, before Argentina can lay claim to a true "national" literature. ^^ And this interpretation of

"national" literature not only must be open to all the disparate, con- 17

tradictory realities, both pleasant and unpleasant, which go into making up the total reality of the nation, ^^ but it must also be prepared to recognize as "national" literature that which fiercely attacks and tears the nation apart. ^"^

The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier is far less accommodating on this subject. He rejects outright the old-fashioned tipicista novels— those which attempted to depict that which is "typical" and unique in Spanish

American societies, the novel otherwise termed criollista . The Mexican

Indian, the Venezuelan plainsman, the Argentine gaucho— all these and more became the novel istic material of idealized, folkloric, often picturesque portraits of Spanish American life with exotic tropical birds, trees, plants, flowers and animals, whose names were almost as foreign to the

Latin American reader as they were to his European or North American counterpart. Thus, many of these novels were accompanied by a glossary of American flora and fauna. Carpentier echoes the sentiments of his contemporaries when he characterizes these attempts at self-identification as early manifestations of literary nationalism and as elements of the tipicista novel which no longer hold any attraction for the contemporary novelist. For it is not through pointing out objects and human types which somehow are unique to a given time and place that a novelist should approach the task of creating a national literature. Rather, it is by looking beyond the superficial differences of Spanish American man to discover the universal experience of all men, everywhere, in Spanish

America, Having established Spanish American man as a universally recognizable human being, the "typical" traits which distinguish him on the surface take on their proper perspective. Thus, for Carpentier, 18

Spanish American man's universality is the dominant factor in literature

today." ;

Cortdzar finds the question of a writer's cultural authenticity

vague and inconclusive. Just what is understood by "autochthonous"

America, he asks. Certainly not much in Argentina. The term, strictly

interpreted, is far too limiting for literature. In support of this view,

he recalls that Borges once asked an intransigent indi genista why instead of having his books printed he did not have them published in the form of quipus. For CortSzar, all writers are autochthonous, even if the

subjects of their work seem unrelated to those themes which folklorists

regard as the identifying elements of their cultures. For the essence of being "autochthonous." ("indigenous" or "national") is to write works which the nation to which the author belongs will recognize as a direct offshoot of its culture, whether or not that nation and its traditions

play a part in the work. Furthermore, national identity must be an outlet,

an opening, and not a limitation. That is why Cort^zar regards Gabriel

•Garcia M^rquez's Cien afios de soledad as one of the most admirable novels

ever written' in Spanish America— the book is incredibly Colombian, he

says, simply because it is so much more besides. Garcta Mcirquez goes

beyond the autochthonous, making room for an all-encompassing view of

the people who inhabit the novel. It is this wider view that gives the

particular view (the local or national identity) credibility and authen-

ticity. Autochthony, CortSzar concludes, underlies national , regional or local identities; providing the author is a truly "national" writer,

that identity will show through no matter what his work deals with or

^^ where it takes place. 19

SSbato agrees with CortSzar that autochthony is more difficult for an Argentine or Uruguayan than it is for Peruvians or Mexicans, who have a long indigenous past.'' Argentina is a rootless nation, a melting pot whose identity is more European than American ("Una vieja boutade dice que 1 OS mexicanos descienden de los aztecas, los peruanos de los incas y los rioplatenses de los barcos "'^).. So for the Argentine, autochthony lacks a clearly definable national identity. Cort^zar says that this must be taken as a positive rather than a negative asset— as the signal to move unencumbered into new territory to search for modern.

Argentina's identity, untrammeled by traditional nationalistic pre- occupations about gauchos, the pampa or the Indians.'^

In the polemic of national versus universal literature, Scibato sees an inherent sense of cultural inferiority among Spanish Americans. He believes that Spanish America has for so long been under the literary influence of Europe, imitating whatever literary styles emanated from the European capitals, that now, in their attempt to establish their own identity, some Spanish American authors seek an originality devoid of

European influence. That says SSbato, is a sign of literary immaturity and naTvet§. For in literature there can be no absolute originality, simply because it is impossible to \jrite in a vacuum. Literature, like all othisr human endeavors, grows and develops predicated on what preceded it. He points out that all great writers of all cultures have "influences" that can be traced to other writers and other nations. The mark of maturity in Spanish American writers will be achieved when they can accept their European heritage without embarrassment or feelings of inferiority, and go on from there to build a literature which will be 20

uniquely Spanish American. '*° For the Cuban novelist Jdsg Lezama Lima,

S^bato's evaluation of this inferiority complex is entirely valid.

Lezama notes that the crux of this cultural quandary stems from the

that vague impression which somehow plagues the Latin American artist

perfection of his he is incapable of achieving the artistic level of

European counterpart. The Spanish American writer views his art form

cosa a resolver"— not ,as a "forma alcanzada, sino [ccmo] problematismo,

Spanish not an accomplished art form but a problem to be solved. And the

American artist seeks to hide what he perceives as inadequate formal expression under the umbrella of autochthony.***

Ernesto Sabato, whose chief preoccupation in his novels is existential, regards man— the individual— and his human condition as the link between the national and universal levels. Loneliness, the ultimate meaning of man's existence, death— these are things which haunt all men,

not just Argentines, Mexicans or Venezuelans."^ And although they are

universal problems, recognizable to readers all over the world, they are

problems which begin with one man, and can be studied by focusing the

novel's attention on one man in a given time and place. The "here and

now," as Sabato says, is the key to investigating the human condition.

The only possibility that an author has of achieving universality in "^ his works is by digging deeply into that which is closest to him.

Miguel Angel Asturias"'* and Colombia's Eduardo Cabal lerdCalderdn"^

both echo SSbato's position: the novelist must move from the particular

to the universal. Asturias thinks the writer's literary vision and scope

should be constantly expanding, but that he should always begin with

that which he knows best. In such a synthesis lies the solution to the

whole problem. *. 21

Cortcizar, who, as we have seen, is often accused in' Argentina of being a "non-Argentine" writer, of turning his back on his native country, regards himself as very Argentine. He attributes the disagreement to a confusion (common to all Latin American nations) between national literature and literary nationalism. The latter is what the "patrioteros" demand— a literature which constantly has Argentina as its theme. The former is literature produced by Argentines,' which, whether or not it has Argentina as its explicit theme and setting, will always bear the mark of the author's Argentinian spiritual and cultural values. .This

is a far deeper and more meaningful literary "Argentinism" than that demanded by literary nationalists.**^ As examples, CortSzar points to the novels of Rulfo, Asturias and Vargas LTosa. Their works, though set very firmly in Mexico, Guatemala and Peru, deal with questions which transcend the frontiers of their particular nations. Cort^zar refers to

their "potenciaci6n creadora de su medio ambiente"— the creative energiz-

ing or giving vitality to their environment. The key word here is creative.

Taking the landscapes and people familiar to them, these writers infuse

them with the creative genius or inspiration which is the mark of the gifted novelist. It is this "potenciaci6n creadora"— this fusing, of the artist's vitality and personal experiences and perceptions with reality

**' which creates a truly "national" literature.

synthesis, then, the novelists almost unanimously proclaim that . In

the solution to the national-universal dilemma is to be found by going

to the individual— the Spanish American individual to be sure— and writing

about him in such a way that a Japanese, a Norwegian or an Ethiopian would

be capable of identifying with his situations, problems and emotions. 22

The Latin American author's view today must reach out beyondhis national borders, for, returning to Octavio Paz's dictum, Latin American man is today the contemporary of all men. And that, says Fuentes, is the essence of being a Latin American today. ''^ It is the depth of the author's view that matters, not the surface area he covers. In this context, one remembers Ernesto S^bato's assertion that there is only one valid literary dilemma: profound literature versus superficial literature.**^ If literature is deep, it will be automatically "national," for it will go to the heart of the nation and its people. Or, as Alejo

Carpentier put it: "...the view the. Latin American intellectual has over the world is one of the vastest, most complete and universal man has ever had. For me the American continent is the most extraordinary world of the century, because of its all-embracing cultural scope. Our view of it must be ecumenic."^" In conclusion, we may cite Carlos Fuentes, who

chose as the editorial principle of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura , which he founded, the legend "a culture can be profitably national only when it is generously universal. ",^^

Models and Forerunners _of the Contemporary Spanish American Novel

the last major section of our introductory chapter deals with the characteristics and elements which make up the new novel in Spanish

America— an attempt to generalize certain tendencies which will, be seen repeatedly in many of the contemporary authors' works, plus some of the novelists' general observations and thoughts on the novel. In this connection, it seems useful to us to discuss some models or forerunners 23

of the contemporary novel. We have purposely omitted the word "influences,"

for tracing literary influences does not fall within the scope of our

study. Thus, what follows are simply several literary trends which will

receive more detailed attention in later chapters. It should be pointed

out that the contemporary Spanish American novelists have relatively

little to say in their theoretical writings about literary "influences"

or models.

Carlos Fuentes, in his discussion of the death of the realistic,

bourgeois novel, ^^. states that trends in twentieth-century literature

and art have helped the old realism along on this road to its extinction

and ushered in the new, experimental forms of artistic expression which

eventually led to the contemporary Spanish American novel. The modern

artist's views of reality have been wider, more all-encompassing and more

subjective. Fuentes mentions Kafka, Picasso, Joyce, Brecht, Artaud,

Eisenstein and Pirandello as major contemporary innovators in Europe.

In Latin America, the transition from the descriptive novel to the more open, more innovative novel was first taken by the novelists who recorded

the epic of the Mexican Revolution.^' However, Fuentes credits two

Uruguayan and two Argentine short-story writers— Horacio Quiroga,

Felisberto Herncfndez, Macedonio Fernandez and Roberto Arlt—with a more significant innovation, without stating precisely what their contributions were. However, he discusses in detail the contributions of two writers- whom he considers have truly turned the Spanish American novel around and headed it in a new direction—Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges and

Guatemala's Miguel Angel Asturias. Asturias, while retaining as subject . matter the same worn-out themes of social oppression and political protest. 24

changed the social document into an artistic creation through the addition and skillful use of myth and language. Borges, in Fuentes' opinion, is the first Spanish American prose-writer to claim the right to write in a deeply personal style, creating an entirely independent, intellectual ized, private, mythical world, not dependent on external reality (although the poets Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda and Octavio

Paz had done the same previously in poetry). And, the Argentinian is also the first fully urban narrative writer in Spanish America.^**

The Borgian idea of constructing an imaginary world is echoed by

Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa, who names the four novelists whom he considers to be the foremost initiators of the new novel in Europe and the United

States: James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and William Faulkner.

Vargas Llosa is particularly attracted to Faulkner's imaginary

Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional world which could be located in Peru or Colombia as easily as in Mississippi.^^

Perhaps the most interesting literary "model" which any of the novelists recognizes is discussed by Vargas Llosa, who says that the closest parallel to what the contemporary novelists of Spanish America are trying to do today is to be found in the medieval chivalric novels of Europe. These novels of chivalry were "total" works, in the sense they attempted a total depiction .of society. Vargas Llosa traces the contemporary novelists' goal of the "total novel" (see Chapter III) to these medieval chivalric novels, and credits the chivalric novel vn'th providing him with the "total" approach for his first two novels. La

.^^ ciudad y^ los perros and La^ casa verde 25-

This brief account of sources or models and forerunners leads us to characterize briefly the contemporary novel. If we examine the novelists' statements on these characteristics and elements, the ideals and self-imposed guides of the novelists will be clarified.

Elements and Characteristics of the Contemporary

Spanish American Novel ,

To begin with, SSbato defines the novel as a genre in the following schematic form:"

(1) It is a partially fictional story, but may contain elements of true history.

(2) It is a type of spiritual creation in which, unlike a scientific or philosophical creation, ideas do not appear in their pure state but are instead mixed with the feelings and passions of the characters.

(3) It is a type of creation in which, unlike science and philosophy, there is no attempt to prove anything: the novel does not demonstrate, it shows ("la novela no demuestra, sino muestra").

(4) It is a (partially) invented story in which human beings called

"characters" appear. According to the era, the taste and mentality of the times, these characters range from solid, corporeal beings who closely resemble those we see daily in the streets, to transparent individuals

sometimes designated only by mysterious initials (as in Kafka's The Trial ) who seem to be merely the bearers of certain ideas or psychological states.

(5) It is a description, an investigation, an examination of the drama of man, his condition and his existence. For there are no novels about objects or animals but invariably about men. 26

that anything more specific than , Sabato concludes that he believes these general statements would pin down the novel too closely, limit its wide-ranging artistic potential and force it to conform to arti-

ficially imposed standards or characteristics. v •

Alejo Carpentier analyzes the problem of novel-writing in terms of what he calls the contextos of Latin American reality. ^^ Carpentier believes the writer should simply create the characters and then let them loose to act and react within these contexts. The result, he affirms, will yield a truthful portrayal in artistic terms of Latin

American reality. We should point out that Carpentier is the only contemporary novelist who employs the concept of contexts in his theoretical statements on the novel. The contexts which form the basis

^^ for Carpentier' s novels" are:

(1) racial contexts : men of one nationality but of different races- white, Indian, black— live together in Latin America, sometimes ages apart in cultural development; intermarriage of these races has produced a large multiracial population.

(2) economic contexts : chronic instability of national economies, due to one or two natural resources -in great abundance (usually in foreign hands), which leads to boom-.and-bust cycles.

" (3) ctonic" contexts ("contextos ct6nicos"): survival of animism, ancient beliefs and practices, often from very respectable cultural sources, which help link certain present realities with remote cultural essences, the existence of which links us with "lo universal -sin-tiempo."

For example, the appearance, in numerous churches in Latin America, of

ornate baroque angels playing the maracas; or Heitor Villa-Lobos' , 27

long-existent Latin American Bachiahas . Brasileiras— cases of synthesis of cultural manifestations with contemporary practices. Or perhaps a better example: the survival of me.lodic elements of the Romance de Gerineldo in the popular^ Cuban song "La Guantanamera, " In other v/ords, elements of the (sometimes subconscious) past surfacing to mix with or to help explain the present.

' (4) political contexts : Latin American nations are historically unstable (with few exceptions), and ha.ve large and influential military sectors whose only reason for being is not to fight wars but to meddle in running the nation's affairs.

(5) bourgeois contexts : within the growing middle class of Latin

America, there is a good bit of mobility, but there is downward as well as upward mobility, and the middle-class citizen is therefore constantly at the mercy of the country's uncertain economy.

(6) contexts of distance and proportion : the American continent is huge and violent—distances are immense, everything is oversized (the Andes, the Amazon, the pampas, etc.) and the continent is subject to periodic natural cataclysms, such as volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, landslides and floods. Unlike Europe, nature in America is untamed (hence the "novel of the land" that dominated Spanish American literature for nearly a century).

. (7) contexts of chronological disorientation ("desajuste cronolfigico"): a cultural "lag" has always plagued Latin America, particularly in literature and the arts. For example. Cubism began to be understood and practiced by artists in Spanish America at a time when it was already pass§ in Europe. Literary movements have historically come to Latin

Ajnerica many years after their initiation abroad. 28

never (8) cultural contexts: Charles P^guy once bragged that he read a book by anyone other than French authors. Carpentier states that for a Frenchman, that is quite possible, for French culture is universal.

But a Spanish American cannot limit his knowledge to Hispanic culture,

for it has glaring shortcomings and lacks universality. Spanish and

Spanish American literature are simply not as representative of

universal literary movements as French literature. So the Latin American

intellectual must of necessity acquaint himself with other cultures and other literatures, in order not to leave gaps in his erudition. For

this reason, Carpentier believes (as we have previously seen) that today's novelist in Spanish America has the widest, most universal view of man

that any writer in the world can claim.

(9) culinary contexts : important due to their particular historical

contexts-^the blending of Spanish cooking with local Spanish American -

cooking resulted, in the criollo cuisine in many regions of Spanish America.

(10) contexts of illumination : light. and shadow modify perspective,

and the great variety of Latin American geography produces an infinite

variety of light, from the diaphanous mountain atmosphere of Mexico City

to the shimmering tropical light of Rio de Janeiro and Havana.

(n) ideological contexts : these are powerful and ever-present,

but must never be allowed to become the focus of the novel, for then the

novel becomes a sermon. An economist or sociologist's report, with photo-

graphs and statistics, on the deplorable conditions in the tin mines of

^° Bolivia is far more useful than a novel about those same conditions.

These, then, are the "contexts" (or basic elements) which the

Spanish American novelist must keep in mind as he creates his novel. 29

With these contexts and Ernesto SSbato's general characteristics of the novel in mi nci, we turn again to SeibatOj who outlines nine general characteristics which distinguish the contemporary Spanish American novelr^V

(1) descent into the "I" ("descenso al yo"): unlike the writers of the nineteenth century, who attempted to objectively describe the physical world outside man, today's novelist turns his vision inward to the primordial mystery of, his own existence.

(2) interior time : traditional narrative fiction was based on a

fixed concept of time—chronological, astronomical time which is - measurable by a clock. Today's writer, as he takes the plunge into his own inner self, must abandon chronological time, because the "I"

(el j^o) operates on a concept of time which is measured not in hours and minutes but rather in anguished periods of waiting, in chronologically unmeasurable experiences of happiness, grief or ecstasy.

(3) the subconscious : in his descent to the "I," the novelist not only must face the subjectivity already known in literature since the r.omahtic period, but the depths of man's subconscious and unconscious mind, the author's submersion into these shadowy zones often produces a ghost- like quality which resembles dreams and nightmares. The characters often are poorly defined, imprecise, and unreal. In this area, the law of light and reason is supplanted by the law of the shadows.

(4) illogicality : logic, cause-and-effect, coherence, clarity, and reason— the bases of the natural sciences, v/hich were in turn the basis of nineteenth-century realism-naturalism in literature— all lose their validity in the nocturnal world of man's subconscious. 30

the old division between sub- (5) the world seen throug h tl]£\;T!.: ject and object disappears. With It goes the old-style novelist's concept of the world and "scenery," which was the idea that they, like from the theatrical scenery in a stage production, existed independently

(scenery) arises the characters. In the contemporary novel , the scene out of the subject along with his state of mind, his visions, feelings and ideas.

plunged into his own (6) the Other ("el Otro"): as modern man has psyche, he has discovered the Other, the double, the reverse side of him-

of self, difficult to describe or define, but always present in the back

the character's mind.

(7) communion: the modern novelist, unlike his nineteenth-century

predecessor, lacks a superhuman point of view (the novelist as omnis-

cient, omnipresent demi-god) and is faced with characters who experience

life from their very limited, subjective inner consciences. Thus today's

novel comes face to face with one of man's most anguishing problems-

loneliness and human communication.

conscious and (8) sacred sense ("sentido") of the body : since man's

subconscious— the "I"— do not exist in a pure state but rather are un-

avoidably contained in man's body, the attempt at communion between souls

is often disastrous or frustrated. Thus, for the first time in the his-

tory of literature, sex acquires a metaphysical dimension^ Sexual love,

unlike either sentimental or pornographic love in the traditional novel,

becomes a sacred act as a consequence of its attempt to establish a

bridge of communication between individuals. 31

(9) knowledge : today's novel has acquired the new dignity of being a vehicle of knowledge. As long as pure science was considered the only vehicle adequate for obtaining knowledge, literature was relegated to the secondary status of entertainment, artifice, or an object of ideal beauty.

But when contemporary man began to realize that reality was not restricted to the physical world, that it included man's feelings and emotions as well, then literature became as valid an epistemological instrument as any other.. In fact, today it is perhaps the best instrument for probing into the deeper recesses of man's mind.

Scibato concludes by stating that the contemporary novel not only gives a more complete account of today's complex world, but has also taken on a metaphysical dimension it did not have before. It explores territory which the traditional novelist did not even suspect, and it has acquired philosophical and cognitive dignity. For these reasons, the novel is certainly not dead or in decline, but entering one of its most vigorous, productive eras. Paraguay's Augusto Roa Bastos agrees, stating that the prime characteristic of today's novel is precisely the annexation of man's interior world, as described by Scibato. This opening up of man's inner self in the novel is important because it is dealt ' with on the esthetic level, and because the investigation into a character's inner existence does not /cut him off or isolate him from his social context or milieu. Even those literary forms which seem farthest removed from the surrounding reality, such as the so-called

"fantastic" literature, are really only a metaphorical restatement of reality." 32

Other novelists offer less schematically organized characterizations of the "new novel." Fuentes, for example, sees. the new novel in terms of its expansion into territories that it had never known before, specifically: myth and prophecy; the alliance of imagination and criticism; ambiguity, humor, and parody, in addition to a major restructuring of language/^

It is interesting to contrast the characteristics listed by S^bato and Fuentes with those of Miguel Angel Asturias, one of the early contemporary novelists. Asturias lists as characteristics of the new novel the use of conversational language based on popular speech patterns, creativity based on primitive beliefs and practice's, the introduction

and a of personified nature, "telluric impulse" ( impulso teldrico) , type of verbal magic unknown before.*" As one of the first innovators of Spanish American fiction, it is not surprising that Asturias' list is less in the vanguard, less revolutionary than that of other writers.

(It is also interesting— and predictable— that each novelist lists as

"characteristics" of the new novel those which reflect the qualities of

his own works.) •

Speaking of the novel as a metaphysical investigation of man, SSbato calls to mind John Donne's statement that no man sleeps in the cart which carries him from the jail to the scaffold where he is to be executed, yet we all sleep from the womb to the grave, or we are not entirely awake.

One of the principal missions of great literature, SIbato says, is to awaken man as he travels to the scaffold— to shock him into awareness

65 of his condition as a finite human being. 33

Julio CortSzar agrees. Early in the history of the narrative, the . novel sought to show us man as he was; the nineteenth-century novel sought to show us what he was like; the contemporary novel asks the why and the

The novel is wherefore ( el por qud y el para qug ) of man's existence. the most adequate literary vehicle for .the artistic realization of

man as a person, as an individual ( el hombre como persona ), and this in-depth human focus is the reason for the wide popularity and readership that have greeted the new novel. ^^ CortKzar also points out as one of the salient features of the new novel that (as we have already seen) when writers such as Rulfo, Asturias, Vargas Llosa and Garcia MSrquez return to the geographical reality of their native countries for the setting of their novels, what results is not the old descriptive realism' but a

"potenciaci6n creadora de su medio ambiente"— a subjective, inner- oriented interpretation (as opposed to description) of the natural surroundings.^'

Two final characteristics' of the contemporary novel in Spanish America are the concepts of the total novel and the open novel. According to these concepts, the novel should give as complete a view as possible of the multiple planes of reality of a very complex world. In order to do so, the novel must be open to all sorts of innovations, including many aspects v;hich heretofore had been considered non-literary. But in the view of today's novelists, if something is within the realm of human experience, then it is, by definition, narrative material, for the novel must be open to; the expression of all human experience and not just selective portions of it. The Cuban novelist Jos§ Lezama Lima typifies today's writers when he says: "La novela americana significa para 34

nosotros algo que ni es novela ni es americana, sino el relato supraverbo, de lo entrevisto, la fiesta del nacimiento de nuevps sentidos. Si no es novela, ,qu^ es esto, exclaman. Hacer una obra que fuerce la aceptacidn, que obliga a que se la traguen como novela."^*

In connection with Lezama's remark, we shall examine in detail in

Chapter II the linguistic revolution of the new hovel. The problem of language is at the center of just about every contemporary Spanish American novelist's novelistic conerns. This linguistic revolution, along with most of the other characteristics which help delineate the contours of

the contemporary novel , has its roots in Modernism. As Ivan A. Schulman has pointed out,^' the contemporary mood of disorientation in a confusing and complicated society; introspection and a turning inside oneself; the acute realization of man's solitude; a profound metaphysical concern often leading to existential anguish; a feeling of futility and pessimism; and the linguistic and stylistic innovations leading to new forms of expression— these are all key elements of the new novel which had their beginnings in the Modernist movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, today's "new" novelis really a stage in the continuing evolution begun by the Modernist renovation in the Hispanic world. 35

NOTES .

ed. .^Carlos Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana . 2nd 16-17. (Mexico: Joaqutn Mortiz, 1 969) , pp.

^Ibid.. pp. 17-18.

^We are defining the traditional novel as that which appeared between 1816, the date of publication of JosI Joaqutn Fernandez de Lizardi's El_ and 1947, the peri qui llo sarn lento , the first Spanish Ajnerican novel, date of appearance of Agusttn Y^nez's Al filo del agua.

Alejo Carpentier illustrates the point by his early novel i Ecue- Yambo-0!. in whch he attempted to portray the life and plight of the poor Negro population of Cuba. Years later, Carpentier regretfully realized for he had not that his book was mere costumbrismo , superficial at best, penetrated into the characters in enough detail to make them live as people. They were mere symbols of their class and race. Alejo Carpentier, Tientos y diferencias (Montevideo: ARCA, 1967), pp. 11-12.

^Carlos Fuentes, op. cit. , pp. 9-10.

^Ibid., p. 11.

'Augusto Roa Bastos, "Imagen y perspectivas de la narrativa latinoamericana actual ," Temas (Montevideo). June-July .1965, pp. 3-12.

^"Somds, pbr primera vez en nuestra historia, contemporcineos de todos los hombres." Octavip Paz, Laberinto de la soledad (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econ6m1ca, 1964), p. 150. •

'Fuentes, op. cit. , pp. 34-35.

/°Ibid., p. 67.

^*Luis Harss and Barbara Oohmann, Into the Mainstream (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 307.

^^Mario Vargas Llosa et al. , Antologta minima de M. Vargas LlQSa (Buenos Aires: Tiempo Contemporcfneo, 1969), pp. 125-126.

^'Fuentes, op. cit. , p. 36.

*'*We will return to the urban aspect of the novel in Chapter IV.

^^Harss, op. cit., p. 306.

" ^^Ernesto S5bato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Aguilar, 1964), p. 8. 36

^'Ibid., p. 12. See Chapter IV for a more detailed discussion of the writisr's obligation to his society.

^^Joaqutn A. Santana, "La vuelta a CortSzar en 80 rounds," Bohemia (Cuba), Feb. 26, 1971, pp. 7-8.

^ 'Julio CortSzar, Ultimo round (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1969), pp. 210-212, "planta baja."

^°Ibid., p. 212, "planta baja."

^^Rita Guibert, Seven Voices , trans*. Frances Partridge (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 137.

^^Ibid., pp. 137-138.

^^Carlos Fuentes, "Hopscotch^" Commentary , Oct. 1966, p. 142.

^"Carlos Fuentes, "Situaci6n del escritor en America Latina," Mundo

Nuevo , July, 1966, pp. 8-9.

^^Santana, op. cit., p. 7.

^^Guibert, op. cit., p. 137.

28ibid., pp. 334-335.

^'Fuentes, La nueya novel a hispanoamericana , p. 23. -

^"Ernesto Gonzalez Bermejo, Cosas de escri tores (Montevideo: Marcha 1971), p. 60.

^^Jose Domingo, "Entrevistas: Gabriel Garcfa M^rquez," Insula, June 1968, p. 6.

^^Sabato, op. cit., pp. 37-38.

"Ibid., pp. 39-40.

3«»i5ij|.^ pp^ 176-177.

^^Carpentier, op. cit., pp. 10-11, 37.

'^Guibert, op. cit., pp. 300-301.

.''SSbato, op. cit., pp. 37-38.

^^Fuentes, La nueya novel a hispanoamericana, p. 25. .

^'Gonzalez Bermejo, op: cit., pp. 101-102.

""Sabato, op. cit., pp. 31-32.

^^Jose Lezama Lima, La expresion americana (Havana: Instituto Naciona.l de Cultura, 195777 p. 18.

"•^Ernesto SSbato, "Por una novela novelesca y metaffsica," Mundo

Nuevo , Nov. 1966, p. 10.

'*^Cesar Tiempo, "41 preguntas a Ernesto SSbato," Indlce , 21, ' ' • No. 206, p. 16. .

"•Guibert, op. cit., pp. 137-138.

•^Various, "Encuesta: La novela en America Latina," Cuadernos , Sept. 1964, p. 6.

^Harss, op. cit. , pp. 237-238.

"'Edelmiro S. Castellanos, "Cortcizar habla sobre Cortcizar y otros temas," El Mundo del Domingo ( Suplemento ), Jan. 15, 1967, p. 7.

"•'Fuentes, "Situacion del escritor en America Latina," p. 9.

•^SSbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 38.

^"Harss, op. cit. ,' p. 44.

^.'Quoted in Harss, op. cit., p. 281.

^^Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana , pp. 16-19.

^^We shall discuss this aspect at length in Chapter III under the section titled "ambiguity."

^''Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana ," pp. 24-26. Both of these trends will be examined in greater detail in subsequent chapters.

^^"Mario Vargas Llosa," (interview by Kal Wagenheim), Caribbean

Review , Spring 1969, p. 4.

. ^^Vargas Llosa et al. , Antologfa minima de M. Vargas Llosa , pp.

'. 140-143. :

^'SSbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , pp. 151-152.

^^The term "context" is borrowed by Carpentier from Jean-Paul Sartre. 38

^^Carpentier, op. cit., pp. 19-34.

^°The authors' social and political commitment will be further discussed in Chapter IV.

^^Sabato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , pp. 86-89.

^^Roa Bastos, op. cit., pi 11.

^^Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana , p. 24.

^"Josg Corrales Egea, "Una charla con Miguel Angel Asturias," Insula . Sept. 15', 1953, p. 4.

^^Sfibato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 90.

^^Julio CortSzar, "Situacion de la novela," Cuadei^nos Americanos. July-August 1950, pp. 227-228..

^'Castellanos, op. cit., p. 7.

^^Reynaldo Gonzalez, "Un pulpo en una jarra minoana," (interview with

Josg Lezama Lima), La Gaceta de Cuba , Sept. 1969, p. 15.

^'Ivan A. Schulman, "Pervivencias del modernismo en la novela contemporanea: exposicion de una teorfa epbcal," in Variaciones interpreta- ed. Donald W. tivas en torno a_ Xl nueva narrativa hi spanoamericana , Bleznick (Santiago de Chile: Universitaria^ 1972), pp. 32-33. .

CHAPTER II

LANGUAGE AND THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

One of the most evident characteristics of the contemporary

Spanish American novel is its linguistic experimentation. The language

of the new novel is at the base of and the direct consequence of the

novelists' search for new directions. The traditionally structured

forms of the Spanish language have given way in the works of many authors

to unorthodox forms of language, often disconcerting to the uninitiated

reader—which is sometimes the author's objective in such experimentation.

In this chapter, we will investigate the language the novelists use

and the rationale they develop for their new linguistic forms.

The Need for a New Language

Carlos Fuentes' contention is that Spanish America lacks a language of its own.* The Spanish spoken in Spanish America is an imported

language, not a native product. It is the end result of the "breach" of the Spanish conquest and colonization and the imposition of an oppressive, hierarchfca.l social and political order. The Counter- Reform- ation destroyed the one great chance for modernization of Spanish society and its language, not only in Spain but also in its American colonies.

Stunted in its modern evolution, the Spanish language for Fuentes is a false language which conceals reality. The Spanish which first came to America was that'of the Renaissance. It was a language which hid the medieval nature of this great colonial undertaking, just as it hid the

39 - 40

shame of the encomienda system under the guise of the Laws of the Indies.

The' "enlightened" language of the Independence movement concealed the fact that Spanish America's feudal structure remained intact. Only the leadership changed. The positivistic language of nineteenth-century liberalism added neo-colonialism in the form of economic dependency as

Spanish America fell" into foreign hands. And the liberal language of the recently demised Alliance for Progress disguised the continuing economic servitude of Latin America to the developed capitalist countries.

In his own Mexico, Fuentes sees the language of the Mexican Revolution hiding the present-day realities of the counter-revolution. And ultimately, the presence, particularly in the large cities of Latin

America, of the beginnings of a consumer society is fed by the mass media, whose interests are divorced from the realities of Latin Ajnerican society. Thus, from its birth to the present day, Spanish America has lacked a truly authentic, non-dependent language—one which reflects the deep, untainted structures of Spanish American life and experience.^

Hence, the basic need of today's Spanish American novelist is to invent a language capable of expressing what has been left unsaid or deformed in more than four centuries of existence since the "breach" of the conquest. Latin America is a continent of "sacred texts"; it cries out for a profanation which can give.yoice to her complexities—a language of her own. A vertically structured, hierarchical, even feudal language cannot speak adequately except for a small segment of Latin American society today.' Thus, the contemporary novelist's role as a linguis.t is at bottom a revolutionary one; he must of,necessity go against the grain of the established order. To go against the established order creates 41

a crisis situation, one which Fuentes finds not only fitting but necessary. **

Ernesto SSba to deals more directly with American Spanish's subservience to its Castilian prototype. SSbato, in discussing the question

of originality in the Spanish American novel, insists that the Spanish . language is a formidable cultural heritage which not only should not be denied but treasured. But to treasure it does not mean to lock it inside

an air-tight glass case and shield it from change. Like all cultural • .

inheritances, language is broadened and enriched by its inheritors, and to seek to freeze it or petrify it is to kill it. Just as

Sarmiento and Martt, in the nineteenth century, and Rub^n Darfo at the beginning of the twentieth century, were instrumental in reshaping the language, so "must today's writers be free to do the same.^

S^bato points to Spain's continuing dominance over American Spanish.

In Spain, he states, the Royal. Spanish Academy of the Language exercises its dictatorial sway. But in Spanish America, the. ordinary citizen is often more self-conscious linguistically and gramatically than his

Spanish counterpart, falling victim to a centuries-old cultural prestige.^

Spain continues to exercise her linguistic tyranny over her former colonies.'

This desire to adhere to a fixed form in language arises from a naive belief in that particular language's insuperable perfection. Such supposed perfection naturally carries with it enormous cultural prestige.

The idea of the language's perfection arises in great measure from the works of the classic writers who have helped shape the language. Spain has a rich literary heritage that includes, among others, Garcilaso de 42

la Vega, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, and ultimately, the incomparable Cervantes. In light of such an impressive list, "classical" peninsular Spanish's prestige in Spanish America is understandable. But SItabo insists that the "good usage" inspired by such writers is questionable. He cites as an example a classical text which reads: "...hoy hacen, senor, segun mi.cuenta, un mes y cuatro dfas..."

Sabato confirms, by searching in Spanish grammars, his suspicion that this phrase contains a basic mistake— an inadmissable error in agreement, showing a grievous lack of grammatical knowledge on the part of the author: But since the phrase comes from Cervantes, the grammatical norms are put in question. Grammarians would no doubt find some justification for Cervantes' error, and probably even condone the error as an "exception acceptable due to good Osage." That notorious

"igood usage" is very easy to establish several centuries later, when history has confirmed Cervantes as a literary genius. For such grammatical mistakes are like coups :d'#tat: if a coup fails, it is referred to as a sinister attempt against the duly constituted authority; if it succeeds, it becomes the date of a national celebration and a model to be followed. The same principle holds true with Cervantes' "...hoy hacen...". The important point is that, when he wrote the line,

Cervantes committed an inexcusable grammatical mistake. Likewise, today's writers in Spanish America— the classics of tomorrow—must be free to make similar "mistakes," to turn the Spanish language in new directions, for they are setting the norms for the next hundred years.^

In conclusion, SIbato attacks the "academic" dictum, resurrected every so often, that, just as the "best" English is supposedly spoken" 43

in Oxford, so the "best" Spanish is supposedly spoken in Toledo. Toledo,

.thus, would represent the absolute seat of authority and correctness of

the Spanish language, and the poor mortals who inhabit the outer

reaches of the Spanish empire would be eternally condemned to babble

monstrous dialects of the mother tongue; This is simply not the case,

for each region or nation lends its own genius or "soul" to the language

it speaks, molding it in subtle ways, adapting it to its own forms of

life and' civilization. This process is one of enrichment and not

impoverishment. And it is shaped by that region's poets, its prose-

writers, and even by the children playing in its streets. The idea of

a "fixed" or "perfect" language, then, is a totally invalid concept.'

The tyrannical prestige of "classical" Spanish, then, must be ended.

Carlos Fuentes states that Spanish America's language will continue to

be false and anachronistic as long as it is content to reflect and

justify the present order of things. Spanish American works today must,

not be of order, but disorder— or an order different from the presently

accepted one. It must not simply reflect (and thus reinforce) the

current "establishment." Today's literature must deny to the established

order the traditional language which it desires; it must oppose that

order with a new language of alarm, of renovation, of discord, humor

and ambiguity—a language, in sum, which will more closely coincide with the true state of Spanish American society and open new avenues

of expression for evolving, future societies.^" Our societies, Fuentes

says, do not want or need more witnesses and critics. They need writers who will look, listen, imagine and speak—and who will deny

that we live in the best of all possible worlds.^* 44

Fuentes reaffirms an idea which we dealt with in Chapter I— that

Europe has lost its central position in world culture, and that today,

universality no longer means adhering to European models. The Latin

American writer, in his "peripheral" geographical and cultural position,

is just as central to universal culture as any writer anywhere, for, going back to Octavio Paz's notion, Latin American man is now the contemporary of all men. Acceptance of this idea leads to the assertion that to write/about the people of Peru or Mexico or Argentina with the language particular to those regions is not to be regionalistic or restricted in scope. The author who does so is simply focusing on the universal by means of the particular and! the familiar. (Fuentes, of course, is not referring to costumbrista writings which are limited

i in scope, but to novels which deal with universal matters, but with a more restricted focus. )^^

Fuentes sees the writer as the essential link between speech and language. He bases his, ideas on the structuralist view of language, * which places linguistic expression between the opposing poles of structure

(language, fixed into a rigid, grammatical system: synchronic), and change (speech, the constant process of linguistic development: diachronic). The point of Intersection between these two categories is

the word, and its shaper, the writer . Thus it is the writer who must fuse the traditional structure of Spanish with the ever-evolving spoken language to form the new literary language. Herein lies the objective of today's novelists. ^^ '

Scibato states that all language in the beginning is emotional, concrete and concise. It is through use and misuse that language becomes 45

corranonplace or words abstract and devoid of real meaning (e.g.,

"honor," "democracy"). It is the writer's goal to return to words their original sharpness of meaning, their conciseness, their value and significance. The way to do this is by coupling words in new and unheard-of ways (he cites Borges' "infame fama") which creates something like an electrical voltage between the individual words, mobilizing their atrophied muscles and giving them a new and unaccustomed brilliance.^**

Returning to his idea that to invent language is to say all the things that have been suppressed for centuries, Carlos Fuentes states that not only is there everything still to be said in Spanish America, but the way to say it is still to be discovered. For immediate reality in Spanish America today offers the writer many of the same social scenarios treated long before by realists and naturalists. The problem is to create a language that will lift such themes above the level of social pretest literature. Hence the contemporary novelists' constant searching and experimentation. Fuentes states categorically: "...si no hay una voluntad de lenguaje en una novel a en America Latina, para mt esa novela no existe." Thus, the linguistic plane of the novel becomes its functional axis; without a renewal of language, the novel cannot be "new," hence valid, today. *^ And, at the center of the linguistic renewal ("linguistic insurrection" is an oftsn-used term for the phenomenon) is the- word itself. The word is, in today's world, power. Fuentes asserts that in its own way' the word is as powerful politically, socially, psychologically, as any force on earth—an updating of the old idea that "the pen is mightier than the sword." 46

A world leader speaks and the mass media make. his words circle the globe iiTBnediately. Fuentes illustrates by pointing to former United States

Senator Joseph McCarthy, who: paralyzed an entire nation with words— pure words, verbal denunciations and accusations without foundation in fact.

And it is the weight of words which turned public sentiment against the war in Vietnam and ultimately brought about the political end of

President Lyndon Johnson. The words of professors, journalists, nev/s commentators, writers and citizens can alter a nation's course. And here, we have the core of Fuentes' conception of the Spanish American novelist's linguistic insurrection.: to fill the void between the total power of the minority and the total impotence of the majority. Spanish

America needs a permanent, constant, critical restructuring of all human problems, at all levels of human society, in order to openly deny the vertical, master-to-slave hierarchy of the existing society. The word is the key, and the writer today holds that key. He can contribute to the creation of a more equal, just society; language, not guns or political power, is the instrument. he. must use. The old language will not do, for it has helped maintain the entrenched order for centuries.

A new language is needed— one that will question and attack the status

quo and show constant disrespect ( desacato ) for it. Language must be liberty, dissent, reproach, disrespect, or else it will be an accomplice to the old order. The problem of language boils down to a constant con- frontation, a permanent dialectic,; between the false, lying words and aspirations of remote, impersonal governments, and the authentic words and aspirations of the artist and his public. The artist's role is

^^ to make certain that the latter prevails. 47

Julio. Cortgzar. through his artistic alter-ego in Rayuela , the fictitious Italian writer-critic Morelli, goes even farther than Fuentes.

Oliveira, the male protagonist of Rayuela , says that the one thing certain in, all of Morelli 's v/ritings is that if we continue to use language as we have until now, we shall all die without ever having even known the true name of the day. Life is sold to us prepackaged, pr.ewrapped in a traditional literary (hence, empty, meaningless) language.

The role of the writer must be to destroy^ language and literature as we know them, in order to create something better upon the ruins. ^' What - that something is remains a vague entity.

Although CortSzar's compatriot Eduardo Mallea does not arrive at the same destructive conclusion on the subject of language, he does express dismay over its present state, which he regards as an obstacle or barrier between man and the expression of his deeper, inner self.

Language, as presently constituted, impedes a full expression of man and the human condition. Mallea does not know what the solution to the problem will be, but he is determined to keep searching for a way to break down the barriers.^®

Expanding on the fictional Morelli's exhortation to destroy language and literature as we now know them, as well as the too-intellectual ized reason which is an integral part of both, CortSzar says that we should not regard him as too much of a terrorist. or anarchist. Morelli's purpose is not to completely raze Western civilization. What he wishes to do when he advocates dynamiting our present language, literature and reason, is to provoke a halt, a reassessment, a self-criticism of our society— to look at the reasons why we have come to what seems to many a

people (exemplified in Rayuela 's Oliveira) to be a cul-de-sac, a civilization that is bankrupt, a labyrinth v/ith no exit. This is the

philosophical point of view presented in Rayuela , and Cortcizar, like

Fuentes, regards our present language as being one which conforms to and expresses the status quo, one which lulls us easily into self-con- tentment and smugness. Before we can become aware of our situation, we must have a technical instrument— a new language— capable of expressing something different, something beyond that which we already know and accept unquestioningly. Our civilization will be able to truly appraise itself and move in new and diverse directions only when language points the way by suggesting a new order, a new direction. And language will be capable of doing this only when the artisans who mold language

(writers) dynamite the existing structures of language and reshape it to meet their needs.''

CortSzar seeks not only to disrupt language but also to destroy the

reader's traditional taboos. For example, in Rayuel , he attacks the sacrosanct principle that one must always read a book starting at

Chapter I, then proceding to Chapter II, and so forth to the end of the book. For that reason, he puts his famous Table of Directions at the

beginning of Rayuela , advising the reader that he may choose between reading the novel in the traditional way,, or else read it according to a preplanned hopscotch method, jumping around in the book until all the chapters have been read. The idea is to break down the traditional structures that stifle our society— to suggest to the reader new, un- thought-of possibilities and directions that a novel might take. The deliberate breakdown and restructuring of language is aimed at the 49

same goal: until we make a profound critical analysis and restructuring of the language of literature, we will not be able to achieve a truly profound metaphysical criticism of human nature and the human condition.

T;he two things must go hand in hand, simultaneously, for one is not possible without the other. And CortSzar indicates that this much- desired linguistic restructuring is not the work of grammarians nor philologists, for their task is simply to institutionalize changes after they have occurred. The task must fall to the writer— the creator,

^° who makes the necessary changes occur. Certainly, Cortgzar's Rayuela .

is on the cutting edge of the linguistic insurrection. CortSzar tells

how an Argentine critic once stated categorically that Cortcizar's first works were better written than the later ones. From the critic's point of view, he was right, but from CortSzar's point of view, he was not.

The earlier works dealt with fanciful, fantastic subjects and the

language he used reflected that literary vein. In his later works, his vision turned inward and he began to search for answers or at least new paths toward answers to the great questions of man's existence, and

he' found that the earlier, more refined, more "literary" style did not

suit his needs, so he destroyed it. This violent act is what upset the

critic, who did not understand the correlation between the change in

language and the about-face in subject. Once again, Cortlzar's act is

the result of his belief that the profound revolution in contemporary

society which is so necessary will never take place unless there is an

accompanying revolution in the language used to give voice to that

^^ society. • 50

The linguistic insurrection or revolution, Fuentes declares (he also refers to it as the resurrection of a lost language), requires a wide-ranging diversity of verbal explorations on the part of the novelist.

As in all revolutions, the road ahead is uncharted and the future is uncertain. The many directions that linguistic exploration is taking nowadays— exemplified in Cortgzar's Rayuela and Jose Lezama Lima's

Paradiso . as well as many, many more— is the surest sign of the contemporary

novel's vitality, originality, and its promise of continuing success in

the future. For today's novelists are attacking frontally the previously

sacred 'rhetoric of literary expression, and Fuentes quotes Baudelaire who said that sacred books never laugh. Notably, laughter, humor, is

one of the marks of the new novel (see Chapter VI). This is further proof

that the novel today is indeed forging new paths and directions'in a

language that had remained too long intact and unchallenged.^^

The developers of this "new" language, incidentally, are quite aware of the paradox inherent in what they are doing— they are, in effect,

biting the hand that feeds them. Their attack on language is an attack

on their own instrument. Although they attack words, they continue to

use them, and to create literature with them. The resolution lies in

the fact that the declaration of war on language is not one of a fight

to the death. The objective is principally to make language more

elastic, more malleable, and hence, more responsive t6 contemporary

needs. The attack, more than on language in general, is on the artificial,

"sanctified" structures into which language has been molded (or forced)

over the years. It is also important to note that the linguistic

revolution is not restricted to the novel— it is occurring in all '

the genres. It stands out more in the novel, however, because it is more recent compared with verse and because the novel has been more conservative and traditional up to now.

Forerunners- of the Linguistic Insurrection

A complete investigation into those writers in Spanish America who have contributed to the renovation of Spanish literary expression would

be a full-length, independent study. Within the scope of • our study we

can only sketch the outlines of this process. There are three pre- . decessors, however, who are frequently mentioned and therefore deserve at least a passing recognition: Jorge Luis. Borges and the literary movement known as surrealism (exemplified by Miguel Angel Asturias and

Julio Cortcizar). '

Turning first to surrealism, this French-inspired movement attracted many Spanish American writers, and linguistic experimentation became an

integral part of its literature. Asturias, discussing the movement in general, says that there was undoubtedly something yery psychologically elementary about surrealism— it allowed the writer (through the technique of "automatic writing") to release the sources of his inner being in a way v/hich conventional writing never did. Asturias was particularly

struck by the surrealistic quality of some of the Indian texts of his

homeland, like the Popol Vuh and the Anales de los Xahil , which possess .

the kind of duality, or inseparability, between reality and dreams or

fantasies which surrealism advocated. In these Mayan texts, the

dreams (or unreality), told in all their detail, seem more real than

reality itself. And herein lie the beginnings of today's "magic 52

realism"— an important aspect of the new novel (see Chapter IV). In magic realism (and in its predecessor, surrealism), there are no definable boundaries between reality and dreams, between reality and fiction, between what is seen or experienced and what is imagined.

The surrealist experimentation of combining words at random to create strange, disconcerting modes of expression enriched the language of later writers (especially Asturias) by means' of euphony and onomatopoeia, and helped to create the magical, dream-like atmosphere of unreality which the surrealists were striving to achieve.^^

The second, and probably the most important forerunner of today's experimenters v/ith language is Jorge Luis Borges. In his far-reaching, philosophical, often disconcerting short stories, this Argentine writer is the first to bring the Spanish language face to face with its shortcomings. Fuentes praises Borges' prose as being the first to shake its reader, to throw him off balance, to hurl him outside himself into the world, thus giving him some sense of his relation with his nation, his continent and his universe. This does not diminish, but rather con-

stitutes ( constituye )— gives substance and relativity to— Latin American man. In order to achieve this new language, Borges mixes genres, turns to old traditions, destroys tired literary habits, and thus creates a new structure into which he injects irony, humor and games. The result is a profound revolution that equates freedom with imagination,- giving the artist free rein over subject matter and form. Fuentes affirms that the giant step Spanish American literature has taken from the protest novel to a critical synthesis of society and a literature of imagination would not have been possible without Borges. 53

Lisa' Block de Behar points to the principal elements by which

Borges began to revolutionize Spanish prose. ^^ He attacked what might have been presumed to be the strongest point— the prestigious richness of the Spanish vocabulary. Spanish has traditionally prided itself on its abundance of synonyms, which prevent dull repetition of a single word. But Borges attacks this aspect of Spanish, saying that the variety of synonyms does not produce nuances of meaning and therefore serves no purpose other than being esthetically pleasing to the ear. Lisa

Block quotes Borges^^ as saying that these synonyms are useless words which "...sin la incomodidad de cambiar de idea, cambian de ruido...."

Abundance without diversity, then, is not opulence but only waste—a false baroque style— for these words are useless in distinguishing between fine, shades of meaning. Borges also rejects the use of words which have been traditionally used for their historical-literary preistige; instead, he illuminates the most trivial, everyday words with new light by juxtaposing them with others in startling config- urations. (Borges for example is a recognized master of the use of the oxymoron.) He seems to have a particular sensibility for combining words in new and disconcerting ways, which draw the reader's attention to the words themselves, thus forcing the reader to focus his attention on the intrinsic meaning of the word. His reader, if perceptive, reacts, is shocked out of his passivity, is forced into a more active role. Lisa Block cites examples from the story titles in Borges' La

," historia universal de la infamia : "El espantoso redentor Lazarus Morell

"El proveedor de iniquidades Monk Eastman," "El asesino desinteresado

Bill Harrigan," "El enemigo generoso. " These titles show Borges' 54

tactic of bringing together concepts v/hich are at least unfamiliar

conipanions, and at times are even antithetical. Borges' "ecumenical"

vision causes not only initial surprise due to these unusual juxta-

positions, but also humor. Through these unexpected juxtapositions,

which no doubt have their roots in the Renaissance conceit , Borges

achieves the classical artistic synthesis of unity in variety. By

doing so, he draws the reader into an active role in the reading of

the story— the reader is induced to share the author's subjective viewpoint of the particular subject that he is portraying. This is a

first step toward the contemporary novelists' desire. to make the

reader an active part of the literary creation, which we will discuss at greater length later. .While Borges has never written a novel himself, today's novelists readily recognize their debt to his innovative prose.

Characteristics of the New Language^ ^

Lisa Block discerns five principal fronts on which the contemporary novelists are waging war on the traditional structures of language: (1) a , mixing of oral, "popular," literature with what would be considered in traditional circles as "serious" or "important" literature; (2) a sudden surge in the humorous, particularly the .ironic brand of humor in the novels; (3) a determined effort on the part of the author to get the reader involved; (4) a notable irreverence or disrespect for the traditional literary conventions; and (5) a frontal attack on old verbal cliches.

Let us examine each of these categories in order to see how they result in a breakdown of the old linguistic structures. 55

(1) In the traditional novel, language was a traditional instru-

ment restricted by established norms. Today's novelists, although they

sometimes still use this "serious" language, mix it with popular speech

patterns which can be heard, not at meetings of the Royal Spanish

Academy, but On the streets and in the countryside. Such language

was infrequent formerly, with the notable exception of the nati vista ,

costumbrista author, who often included popular speech patterns in his

novels in an effort to help define in the novel his home region or

country. But the nati vista author almost always chose an exceptional,

dialectical variation, of Spanish, peculiar to a particular region— one

thinks iiTBtied lately of the Argentine gaucho literature or of the

phonetically written passages of Indian speech in Jorge Icaza's

Huasipungo . In both cases, the language, phonetically spelled out, is

uniquely characteristic of the region portrayed as well as the social

class of the speakers. The aim of the current novelist is not at all

the same— in fact, it is just the opposite. Today's novelist, in using

popular, colloquial speech, is not attempting to "define" the character

of any particular region. Instead, he is attempting to desanctify the

heretofore sacrosanct language of Spanish American literature, to write

a contemporary novel in contemporary language, and thus make it more accessible to today's readers. While a few local words may crop up

here and there' (Argentine lunfardo in Rayuela , Peruvian slang in La ciudad y los perros ). they do not in any way block the reader's under-

standing of the language as a whole. This is because the popular language that the writer is employing is- generally everyday conver-

sational language— the spontaneous, living language people speak when 56

they are not consciously aware of "speaking correctly." This is a language understandable across regional and national borders. It is sbmetimes mixed with the more formal, "literary" language to provide contrast and make the reader aware of the transition (this occurs in

Rayuela ), and other times the author uses this conversational style exclusively. An example of the latter would be Juan Rulfo's Pedro

PIramo, in which the voices of the- people of rural Mexico set the style for the language used. It is a spoken, conversational language, devoid of rhetorical pretense. Rulfo says of it: "...it isn't a calculated language. I don't go put with a tape recorder to take down what people say and then try to reproduce it afterwards. There's none of that here. That's simply the way I've heard people speak since

I was born. That's the way people speak in those places."^® In other words, he is attempting simply to write as people speak— openly, freely, and without "literary" complications.

The use of oral, spoken language also serves the purpose of deflating the literary forms v/hi,ch it generally accompanies. For example, Lisa Block cites phrases such as "se lo juro," "usted me entiende," and "la senora qufitedije," which appear frequently within a more "serious" or "literary" context in Julio Cprtolzar's La vuelta

- " ! ial dta en ochenta mundos.^^ They serve to desanctify and contaminate the literary language toward which CortSzar feels such a revulsion.

Oral literature is another form of today's linguistic innovation, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante is one of its chief practitioners. He describes his novel Tres tristes tigres as a "gallery of voices," and says that in his book, narrative in the traditional sense is not —

important. There are two or three basic stories in the novel which are repeated and altered by the various voices which narrate.^" Cabrera

Infante declares that his book operates on a totally personal level insofar as the plot is concerned, but that its real base is the spoken word, not the action or the characters. He states: "...mi primera preocupacidn.. .fue y ha sido siempre la de tratar, ver la manera.de conseguir, llevar al piano literario el lenguaje que hablan todos los cubanos... Es decir, llevar este lenguaje si td quieres horizontal,

absolutamente hablado, a un piano vertical , a un piano artfstico, a un piano literario. Es decir, pasar de ser un lenguaje simplemente hablado a un lenguaje escrito....' Precisamente de lo que se trataba era de escribir lo no escrito..."^^ Here then is Cabrera's definition of oral literature. In such a scheme, plot and characterization are naturally relegated to secondary importance. The idea of the novel as a gallery of voices is the central concern. He emphasizes, however, that the language he wishes to transpose to the page is "...not the living language of the Cubans, either in their Platonic or Marxian senses only the essentials of their language projected to what for me was at the time the highest literary potential. "^^ That is, he does not go out with a tape recorder and transcribe exactly what he hears. The voices in Tres tristes tigres are voices which have been strained through the author's esthetic consciousness and molded to suit his needs. Cabrera says:

I knew that the lives and the language depicted [in

Tres tristes tigres] ... , those talkative specimens and their spoken habitat, v/ere condemned to disappear into silence, not in the course of time. ..but rather to be abolished by history— that is to say, condemned to 58

vanish by the revolution through' an immediate catastrophe by decree: a loquacious people reduced to laconisifi. ,., Thus

and by a quirk of history, [ Tres tristes tigres] ended by becoming a gallery of voices, almost a museum of Cuban speech in which generations to come will be able to listen ^^ to their ancestors, their old artificers, talking.

Out of this "oral" writing naturally flows the rampant verbal humor which characterizes the book. Cabrera Infante is the recognized

Spanish-language master of the pun. He takes two or more roots of a single word to form a cluster of meanings, leading not only to a humorous reader reaction but also to a basic cleansing of the words themselves.^** Cabrera Infante's natural penchant for this game of

"verbal tennis" is evident in the following, in which he discusses (in

English) the process of translating Tres tristes tigres : "We... went

into collective bouts and fits of paronoidmassia , created Spannish,

Spunish, spanning spoonerisms where there were none originally, enhanced

its joyceful playfulness with new anal grams , other palindramas . different

..."^' across-sticks , and broadened, its linguistic scope.

Cabrera Infante, although he is perhaps the chief proponent of oral literature, is certainly not the only one. Many Spanish American novelists turn to the spoken word to a greater or lesser degree in their works. Even Miguel Angel Asturias, considered today to be an originator of the "new novel" but not one of its chief contemporary innovators, says that the oral aspect of language has aided .him. His famous novel

El sefior presidente was spoken before it was written, he claims.. He and a group of friends used to get together to share stories orally about dictators under whose regimes they had lived, and that is how the book began to take shape in his mind. He says he could recite entire chapters 59

by' heart before he ever wrote them down. ^^ So the oral aspect of writing is certainly not new.

(2) Kumor has been introduced into the contemporary Spanish American novel' simultaneously with the use of oral language. This is a startling departure from the traditional novel, which took itself completely seriously, allowing no place for laughter. Not only was the language of the traditional novel sacred, but so was its theme and tone. The two phenomena of oral language arid humor go easily together,, for humor- particularly that type of humor based upon plays on words— is clearly tied to a supple, pliable language which can be manipulated for amusing or ironic effects. ^^

(3) One of the primary objectives of the contemporary Spanish

American novelist is to involve the reader actively in the creation of the novel as well as the reading of it. The novelists' use of such tactics as oral language and humor, as well as many others, is aimed

(at least partially) at attracting the reader's attention and drawing him out of his traditional, passive role as mere absorber of the novel.

Julio Cortcizar is one of the principal proponents of what he refers to as the "accomplice reader," and we shall examine his and other novelists' theories in detail in Chapter III.

(4) The contemporary novel is marked by an aggressive irreverence or disrespect for established literary and linguistic conventions.

Specifically, the author shatters traditional syntax, the traditionally

"literary" vocabulary, correct spelling, the phonetics of words and phrases. The author's purpose in breaking all the accepted rules is to render the Spanish language more elastic, more malleable, more 60

ductile and flexible, so that it can be reshaped to meet the overall

needs of contemporary society and the novelist's own personal needs.

Carlos Fuentes points to Vargas Llosa's La casaverde as a first

example of this phenomenon of the destruction of literary and linguistic

^° sacred cows. In La casa verde , verb tenses and subject pronouns are

confused. The past is narrated in the present tense and the present in

the past tense. Jn Fuentes' structuralist view of language, Vargas

11 osa turns structured language ( lengua ) into the live, constantly

changing process of speech ( habla ), as in the following oral conver-

sation, taken from Vargas Llosa's book: "Td pasaron cerca y en

caballos chucaros, que tales locos ^ van hasta el rfo, ahora regresan,

no tengas miedo chiquito, y ahi.su rostro girando, interrogandp, su ansiedad, el temblor desu boca, sus unas como clavds y sus manos por qu6, c6mo y su respiraciSn junto a la tuya. Ahora calmala, tu yo te explico, ToRita, ya se fueron, iban tan rcipido, no les vT las caras y ella tenaz, sedienta, averiguando en la negrura, qui^n, por qu^, c6mo."

The effect is to throw the reader into the midst of the conversation, dizzily trying to follow thei changes of speakers, with only an occasional "tij" or change in verb tense or person to indicate a change in speaker. Vargas Llosa has completely done without the traditionally structured and acceptable way to present dialogue, with each speaker's name clearly indicating his share of the conversation.

Fuentes points to Alejo Carpentier for a second example. ^^ Carpentier substitutes the hallowed convention of characters and plot as the central structures of the novel with a fusion in which characters and plot, rather than occupying center stage, become instead resistances 61

( resistencias ) to a total language which develops in all directions of

lo . real— that which is real (as opposed to la realidad— reality—which

may be deceptive and, in the end, false). Fuentes compares the change

using Carpentier's favorite comparative art: music. He states that

just as contemporary music has abandoned its horizontal -vertical

structure of melody and harmony to become total sound, so the novel

today asserts its right to be total writing, total language, with this

total language flowing over, touching and colliding with the multiple

planes of lo real . We suspect that Fuentes had Carpentier's El acoso

in mind when he wrote this. A further illustration may be found in La

casa verde ; in this novel, plot and characters certainly assume a rather

secondary position vis-cl-vis the principal elements of time, space and

language, all of which are multiple planes representing Vargas Llosa's

Peru.

Yet another example to be found in Carpentier is the throwing away of the false illusion of recreating la realidad . **" In the traditional

novel, such as Dona Barbara , language represents directly, it. reproduces

"reality": the Venezuelan plains and Santos Luzardo are nothing more nor less than their intended "mirrored" image. In the contemporary novel, on the other hand, there is an awareness of the artifice of creation.

Fuentes notes by way of example that Carpentier's short story "Viaje a la semilla" is merely a representation of a former representation.

That is, the story is a recreation (through the backward movement of time) of a former recreation (the literary recounting of the man's life) of an aspect of reality (the man's life itself). The literary recreation

(the story) knows that it has no existence outside of literature. This 62

awareness of its own artifice is one of the strengths of the modern

narrative, Fuentes believes, because it forces the reader to take

stock of the situation and separate reality from fiction. The reader

can no longer passively read and obligingly accept the printed page

as a straightforward presentation of reality. He is forced to

think, thereby joining the process of literary creation.

Cortelzar speaks of "unwriting" ( desescribir ) rather than "writing"

novels—meaning the invention of a counter-language, not to replace the

present word images and figures, but to go beyond them."^ Where such a

process will lead, CortSzar himself does not know. He only hopes it

will create something better, something capable of expressing the

profundities and vagaries of human experience. At any rate, his attack

on the root of language^the word— stems from his desire to "unwrite"

a novel. His attitude toward words, states Fuentes, is the same as

Octavio Paz's, v;ho says: "AtrSpalas, cSgelas del rabo, chillen, putas"-

the individual v/ord is a "whore," selling itself to any user, with no

deep meaning, betraying those who entrust it with meaning. Fuentes

concludes by saying that the author must "pour" (verter) the word if .

he is to achieve a meaningful expression through words. By "pouring,"

he means reshaping, remolding to meet his needs. For only a reshaped

("poured") word or language will be able to deny the false reality that a false language has given us for so long, and substitute in its place

**^ a view of the totality of To real.

(5) The fifth and final area of attack against language in Lisa

Block's analysis is the willful destruction of all those forms of

"prefabricated" or "ready-made'' expression which are a sign of laziness 63

or lack of inventiveness on the part of the writer: set phrases,

cliches, trite or pedantic expressions. Words and phrases, as we

said earlier in this chapter, begin with a clear, concise meaning.

It is through repeated usage that they gain layers of extra meanings,

or nuances of the original one. Through repeated use, words coalesce

into set patterns, and after a while, the euphony of the phrase

obliterates its meaning for the hearer or reader— it is used because •

it "sounds right." The original significance, of the word or phrase

is dulled or even lost. The attack on the cliche is an attempt to

recharge the word or phrase with its original clarity and concision.

Asturias is a case in point. He sees the foundation of the language

revolution as being centered around plays on words, onomatopoeia,

parallelism (the repetition of a single concept through the use of different words— a practice inherited from the Mayan Indians), the multiplication of syllables and the use of augmentatives, all iterations, verbal refrains, and the mating or juxtaposition of words that, as the Mayan Indians say, have never met before (Asturias points out that the Indians say that poetry is where words meet for the first time).**^

All of these methods or instruments serve the purpose of drawing the reader's attention to the individual word, forcing him to evaluate its content and meaning. These techniques do not allow preformed phrases to stand, but are instrumental in expressing in a novel;v/ay what may or may not already be familiar. What is important is that the words not betray the writer simply because they are worn out and meaningless due to overuse. )

The Baroque Tendency Versus Simple, Straightforward Language; "Beauty" in .Language

.Lisa Block de Behar notes that traditional literary language has been venerated and revered for so long that it practically stands apart from present-day spoken language as a separate system, one which needs to be "learned" by the beginning writer. This dichotomy between literary and spoken language traces its origins all the way back to the Spanish

Golden Age, in which the dichotomy between lo culto arid lo popular— the "educated" versus- the "popular" in literature—was a major issue.

It seems to us that there are two clearly identifiable trends in the contemporary Spanish American novel which strive to eliminate this distinction between "literary" and "non-literary" language— a "baroque"

trend and a simpler, straightforward style. Superficially, .these may .. appear to reincarnate the Golden Age dichotomy between baroque and classical, but in reality, they are both meaningful, though divergent means to a single end— the destruction of the old-style, "literary," clichg-ridden language. Language which is false or artificial, the so-called "pure literature," is the target of both tendencies. Let us examine each of these trends in further detail, beginning with the tendency toward the baroque.

The Colombian critic and short story v/riter Oscar Collazos defines

"baroque" (in terms of today's Spanish American novel) as meaning two . things: (1) it refers to scenography— a way of portraying geography or the utilization of a language which seeks to exhaust itself through the word, through verbal reiteration or in interminable descriptive

phrases, in instrumental erudition ( erudici<5n instrumental ; and (2) it 65

also refers to the intent to .carry the verbal recreation of reality to

its furthest consequences. Collazos cites four illustrative examples

of "baroque" novels in Spanish America: Carpentier's El siglo de las

luces , Garcfa Mlrquez's Cien afiosde sol edad , Juan Marechal's Adcfn

**" Buenosayres , and Lezama Lima's Paradiso.

Alejo Carpentier is the foremost proponent of the baroque as the

language most apt for the Spanish American novel, and his novels reflect

his beliefs. He states very simply: "El legttimo estilo del novelista

latinoamericano actual es el barroco." He bases his theory of the baroque

on the fact that, as he states,"*^ Spanish American art in all forms has

always been baroque: beginning with pre-Columbian sculpture and pottery

(example: the twisting, contorted Peruvian huacos depicting physical

love, combat and other forms of violent movement and emotion) and highly

decorated codices; to the elaborate (sometimes tortuously so) cathedrals

and monasteries of the Colonial period. Our art today, says Carpentier,

tends naturally toward the- baroque because it is historically "our

style," and responds best to the Spanish American novelist's need, to

name things . The novelist must "name" all that which defines and surrounds

him in this strange and unfamiliar new world— the "contexts" which we

introduced in Chapter I— in order to place himself on a universal plane.

Carpentier. totally rejects, of course, the approach of the nati vista

novel of "naming" (with an appendix to explain exotic vocabulary). His method is to define through an accumulation of adjectives and qualifiers

of precise, delimiting meaning, painting a verbal picture, but always

remaining on a universal plane. In this way, he believes, the Spanish

American world will be comprehensible to everyone, and not regional or inward- looking. Even that which is strange and exotic to outside 66

eyes and mi rds will take on a semblance of veracity and credibility.

Through \the lush, luxuriant, yet concise baroque language, the Spanish

/\merican author can expand his literary horizons, opening up ever greater areas for exploration. (Carpentier contrasts the baroque con-

cept with the contemporary French nouveau roman , which, he says, is a constricting movement, an attempt to narrow the novelist's focus

)'*^ rather than widen it. .

The master of the baroque is Lezama Lima, who defines his "poetic system of the world" as follows: "El sistema portico no pretende tener ni aplicaciSn ni inmediatez. No aclara, no oscurece, no se derivan de §1 obras, no hace novelas, no hace poestas; Es, estci, respira....

Lo que pretende esun henchimientp, una dilatacifin de la imagen hasta la Itnea del "horizonte."'*' Lezama uses a highly baroque language, accumulating images and metaphors in an overwhelming flow of words— to portray his poetic system, seeking to open the novel's view to the widest possible vision of mankind. The idea is that through total language, one can perhaps achieve a total novel.

Julio CortSzar warns against the use of language for language's sake alone, however.**® He cites examples— Gabriel Mird and many of the novels of Camilo Jos^ Cela—of authors whose works go no farther ' than language, with nothing beneath. Language in them becomes an end rather than a means to an end. Cortdzar calls this type of writing

"verbal masturbation," or, as Borges preferred to call it, a way of

"mixing up the dictionary." For CortSzar, a highly worked, polished language should serve the purpose of conveying to the reader a system

(not a "message") such as his own philosophical system ( toyuela ) or 67

Lezama Lima ' s poetic system ( Paradiso ) . Language for CortSzar should open windows on reality, it should aid in the metaphysical search which

is Cortclzar's central concern. Although CortSzar does not speak in terms of "baroque" and his own v/ritings hardly fit the definition, of the term, his attitude is* favorable with regard to the" baroque as understood and

used by Carpentier.

Certainly not all of today's Spanish American novelists agree with

Carpentier, however, Mexico's Juan Rulfo stands at the opposite end of

the spectrum, as an advocate of a very simple and straightforward, un- , complicated narrative style. Rulfo uses a language as lean and spare as Carpentier' s is rich and luxuriant. For Rulfo, simplicity is the soul of language, and he consciously avoids the baroque tendency of many of his contemporaries: "I try to defend myself against the baroque, and

I'll continue to do so, with all the means at my disposal."**^ So bare-boned is Rulfo's language that Lisa Block refers to his writing as linguistic "asceticism. "^° His economy of language, she states, seeks to return to the primary function of the word— to use it as an instrument

of expression and not as an instrument of adornment . Through linguistic synthesis, Rulfo regains for language its function of communication.

This stark language, stripped of adornment, is uniquely appropriate for his description of the dusty villages of Jalisco and their reticent inhabitants. One wonders if Rulfo was conscious of the parallel between stark language, stark landscape and a taciturn people, or if it simply came naturally to a man who is taciturn himself and is a native of the region he depicts. One may suspect that rather than being a carefully orchestrated theoretical, approach to v/riting, Rulfo's 68

style is simply a form of expression best suited to his own temperament.

As we noted above, he aims to write in an oral, conversational style

which is simple and direct: "I don't want to speak as you write, but

"^* to write as you speak.

Ernesto Sabato shares Rulfo's dislike of literary language. He

says ^^ that for centuries, writers and readers have abided by a dual

standard of language, with the simple, straightforward language of

daily conversation being used in daily life, and a. special, high-flown

language being set aside for use in literature'.. He calls this latter

a "Sunday language" ( lenguaje dominguero ). The everyday variety was

fine for person-to-person contact but the "Sunday-best" variety was

always trotted out when it was a question of creating art. Sfibato

notes that this tendency still persists in many journalists and some

authors in Spanish America, who think it more refined to write equino

where cabal lo would be adequate. They do not seem to realize that

poetry is not created with poetic words but rather with poetic deeds or

facts ( hechos ), expressed in a simple and direct way. The mark of a good writer, says SKbato, is that "...un buen escritor expresa grandes .cosas

con pequenas palabras; a la inversa delmal escritor, que dice cosas

insignificantes con grandes palabras. "'' Scibato backs up his position quoting the French philosopher-writer Pascal who commented on writers to whom (for example) "capital of the kingdom" sounded more refined, more elegant or more "literary" than "Paris": "Cuando uno se encuentra con un estilo natural, se queda asombrado y encantado: porque esperaba hallarse con un autor y se encuentra con un hombre."^** 69

SSbato insists, however, that the idea of a natural style in.

language does not denote an easy or spontaneous style. Quite the con-

trary, a "spontaneous" style would nearly always sound ragged and thrown-

together. In order to make a piece of prose sound natural, it is generally necessary for the writer' to work and rework his material, paring away what is unnecessary until the expression sounds easy and fluid. Perhaps the fact that SSbato has only produced three novels of note to date bears him out on this subject. We suspect that Juan Rulfo, who has written only one novel and one collection of short stories, would agree. S^bato sums up his position: "Es que los grandes creadores no son grandes por esa mera acumulacidn de vocablos sino por el poder revelador y expresivo que logran de los vo'cablos archiconocidos.

Como en el ajedrez, una palabra no vale por st sola sino por su posicidn, por la estructura total de que forma parte. Sdlo un escritor mediocre puede desdenar ciertas palabras, como un mal jugador desdena un pedn: ignbra que muchas veces sostiene una posicidn. "^^

On the question of beauty in language, S^bato states categorically that today's literature does not propose beauty as its objective,. If

beauty is achieved incidentally , that is another matter, and is worthy of praise. But he insists that the purpose of literature is to delve into the meaning of man's existence, to get to the bottom of the great rnysteries of life and death. No word must be uttered in vain, and if it is (SSbato gives as an example some passages in James Joyce), it constitutes a serious defect in the literary work. ^^ SSbato goes on to say that neither Shakespeare nor Dante was consciously aiming for beauty of expression, but that their goal was the metaphysical exploration of man's -

existence which S^bato also advocates. ^^ If they ultimately achieved beauty in their works, he says, it is not that "mere" beauty which one achieves by seeking it consciouslyi but rather a great and tragic

^® beauty which arises naturally out of the depths of man's being.

Gabriel Garcfa MSrquez agrees. He tells his stories as the common people do— unfalteringly, mixing reality with fiction, but with a firm conviction that it is all true (see Chapter Ill's section on "style").

He states that "the problem of literature is words." His short novel

El coronel no tiene quien I'e escriba was written nine times. Garcta

Mirquez ironically comments that it seemed he was writing the novel in

French rather than in Spanish, a reference to the purity, the conciseness and the simplicity of the language.^'

In answer to an interviewer's question concerning whether or not

literature can create an autonomous language of its own, Guillermo Cabrera

Infante replies that such would be impossible without falling into the

esthetic errors of writing belles lettres and into an excessive preoccupation with style, with "fine writing," worrying over le mot juste—

becoming entangled in the old-style "Sunday" language, in fact— and that,,

he states, would be "the most idiotic of pursuits."*"

On this question of beauty in language, the novelist who has probably

had the most to say is Julio Cortclzar. CortSzar's fictitious alter-ego,

the writer-critic Morelli, addresses the subject from the pages of Rayuela .

Morelli tells us* ^ that he is writing a short story vihich he wants to

be the least "literary" possible. It is a very difficult task, however,

for "beautiful," "literary" expressions keep popping up naturally, un-

thinkingly. He cites an example: to describe a character wal king down a 71

staircase, he writes "Ramfin emprendiS el descenso." He' scratches this

out and replaces it with "Ram6n empez6 a bajar." Theri.he stops to ask

himself why he has such an intense dislike for the "literary" language

of "emprendi6 el descenso." It means precisely the same thing as

"empezd a bajar";'the chief difference is that the latter is prosaic

(that is, a mere vehicle of information) while the former combines the

useful (information) with the agreeable (it is "elegant," it "sounds nice"). What repels him in the literary form, Morelli says, is the use of a verb and a noun which we almost never use in daily conversation. They are there merely for their decorative effect. He fears, however, that

if he persists in this vein, everything he writes will prove to be boring and uninteresting. But at the same time that it seems to him that he is writing badly, he sees reason for hope. His former style (which we may equate, incidentally, with CortSzar's 'language in his early works, particularly the fantastic short stories) was merely a mirror for what

he calls "swallow-readers" ( lectores-alondra ), who found recognition and solace in such "literary" language. It is much easier, he declares, to write "esthetically," "beautifully" (the conventional way)- than it is to

"unwrite" ( desescribir ) as he would like to do, in an antiliterary manner.

He sees the whole question as a moral one— to do What is right, and not what is easiest. The only beauty that is satisfactory, he says, the only beauty that is artistically valid is created when the artist fuses his perception of the human condition with that of his own condition as an artist. Morelli concludes: "En cambio el piano meramente estetico me parece eso: meramente. No puedo explicarme mejor. "^^ 72

Morelli's disdain for a "merely" esthetic, "literary" language is exemplified in Rayuela in an incident involving Oliveira. Cortcizar recounts, it: v

... Rayuela , from a stylistic point of view, is very badly written. There's even a part (chapter 75) where the language starts to become very elegant. Oliveira remembers his past life in Buenos Aires, and does so in a polished and highly chiseled language. It's an episode that's written fussing over every word, until, after about half a page, suddenly Oliveira breaks out laughing. He's really been watching himself all the time in the mirror. So then he takes his shaving cream and starts to draw lines and shapes on the mirror, making fun of himself. I think this scene fairly well sums up what the book is trying to do.^^

Oliveira is obyiously making fun of what Cortcizar describes as an author's clearing his throat, fanning out his tail feathers, and re- producing on a slightly higher level what a semil iterate man does when he sits down to write a letter and finds it necessary to use a completely different language from the one he ordinarily speaks. CortSzar affirms that literature abounds With "well -written" works which say nothing at all if one looks closely. Any attempt to separate. form and content

(another of the traditional literary myths) is erroneous, for the one must adjust to the requirements of the other. A writer may have a very • florid, highly developed style, but have nothing to say. Or he may have much to say but lack the necessary linguistic skills. In either case,

the writer will be a failure, Cortlzar says, for to be successful , the writer must achieve the synthesis to which .Morelli referred (above). ^"^

And in his search for a new language, Cortcizar-Moreni is seeking (by rather different means) to achieve the same end Borges sought (v.s.), that is, to recapture the pristine conciseness, the sharp-edged precision 73

of each word: "Lo que Morel! iquiere es devolverle al lenguaje sus derechos. Habla de expurgarlo, eastigarlo, cambiar "descender" por

"bajar" como medida higi^nica; pero lo que 61 busca en el fondo es devolverle al verbo "descender" todo su brillo, para que pueda ser usado como yo uso los ffisforos y no como un fragmento decorative, un pedazo de lugar comun."^^

Experimentation with Language

Without pretending to offer a complete analysis, and relying once again on the categories used by Lisa Block de Behar in her study, it would be fair to state that the fundamental thrust in the current "linguistic insurrection" is the breaking up of cliches, and the attendant

surprising and humorous effects obtained as a result. Lisa Block cites

as examples Cortcizar's "la frente s urcada de argucias"^^ (replacing the

time-worn phrase "la frente surcada de arrugas") and Cabrera Infante's

".i;del azuloso mar procelado (io se dice azulado mar proceloso?),"^'

deliberately confusing the endings of two poetic ("literary") words.

The humor and the value of such cliche attacks lies in the fact that

the reader reacts with pleasure and enjoyment, even self-satisfaction, •

when he discovers the old (clichg) form and subsequently sees the humor

or irony in the new form. The imbalance between the two (v/hat Lisa

Block calls the desnivel humortstico ) results not only in a humorous

twist, but also in an enriched meaning, because not only does the new

form carry its own (usually humorous) meaning but also, implicitly, the

old, discarded meaning. Thus the figure of speech is enriched and trans-

formed; it operates on two levels of meaning rather than one. Rather than 74

a desescn'tura such as CortSzar suggests, Lisa Block suggests that this

is a sobrescritura , since the original meaning is not destroyed, but only

camouflaged.

. A second method of attack, related to the first, is the use of

the double-entendre (la dilogfa )— the word or phrase- with a double

meaning— to create a humorous and disruptive effect on a set phrase,

whose popularly accepted meaning is based on only one of its two

possible meanings. Two examples from Cabrera Infante illustrate this

method: "...yo me metf una servilleta de papel (era una fonda a la

moderna) en la boca para ahogar la risa, pero.la risa sabta nadar

crawl. .."^®; and "Of una cascada de risa, una sola larga carcajada m^s

cubana que argentine. '"^^ In each of these examples, Cabrera Infante ^

attacks the clichg by attacking the key word within it, offering a

second and totally nonsensical meaning for the word in question. In

the first example, he attacks ahogar , suggesting its litera-l meaning

"to drown" rather than its figurative ("correct") meaning "to stifle"

by saying that his laughter could swim the crawl. In the second example,

' he attacks argentine , suggesting its more commonplace meaning "Argentine"

rather than its more literary ("correct") meaning "silvery" by juxta-

posing it with another adjective of nationality, "cubana." Thus, by

manipulating a second (usually more ordinary, less "literary") meaning

of the key word in a cliche, the author can reduce the cliche to a

shambles, to a linguistic joke, making the reader aware of the words

themselves and the artificiality of their traditional groupings.

Two opposing experiments against established forms in language are exemplified in Rayuela— the running together of contiguous words in a set 75

phrase or the breaking up of words into hyphenated syllables: ". ..mientras

Babs lo miraba admirada y bebiendosuspalabrasdeunsolotrago... ",'''' and

"...mientras Gekrepten se-re-tor-ct-a-las-ma-nos..."!^ Although these

two methods are more or less opposite in technique, they are aimed at • and achieve the same end— the destruction of the clich6 employed. In order to decipher these passages, the reader is forced to slow down, and most likely to read them aloud to himself. By doing so, the author has forced the reader to stumble over the familiar— two figures of speech as conmon as "bebiendo sus palabras" end "retorcer las manos." By faltering over these worn-out phrases rather than skimming unthinkingly over them, the reader is forced to 'take stock of both the sound and the meaning of the words, thus "recreating" them for himself.

A further form of attack on the written language is made by alterations in spelling. The writer who changes the spelling of words sees himself as recreating those words, making them his. He is also making fun of those words, and of the Spanish system of spelling. These intentional misspellings tend to occur using those few letters in the Spanish alpha- bet which can cause confusion in spelling due to their soundor lack of sound (such as a"d 2. li £» h. ^^^ 3M.i 1» £ 3"^ 1? II ^^^ L* k 2"^ 1» 3"^ the silent h^). Some examples of jdeliberate alterations in spelling are

Cabrera Infante's "...queremos quomer. — Pero, haziendo burlas, amiguito, no se come.. ."'^; and Julio Cortcizar's playful silent h^: "En esos casos

Oliveira agarraba una hoja de papel y escribta las grandes palabras por las que iba resbalando su rumia. Escribta por ejemplo: 'El gran hasunto,'

'la hencrucijada. ' Era suficiente para ponerse a refr y cebar otro mate con mcls ganas. 'La hunidad,' hescribta Holiveira. 'El hego y el 76

Usaba hotro. ' las haches como otrbs la penicilina. Despu^s volvfa mds

despacio al asunto, se sentfa mejor. 'Lo himportante es no hinflarse,'

se decta Holiveira. A partir de esos mpmentos se sentfa capaz de

pensar sin que las palabras le jugaran suclo."'^ Cort^izar supplies one

further in example Chapter 69 of Rayuela . of which the following is an

excerpt: "El desaparesido. krefa en la bida futura. Si lo konfirmd,

ke aya en eya la felisidad ke, aunke kon distintas karakterfsticas,

anelamos todos los umanos.""* Writers see such "terrorism" against proper

spelling as "demystifying" words— taking away the sacred, untouchable

aura which surrounds them and making them more accessible,^ more malleable,

more usable. And as Lisa Block points out, this "trick" also makes fun

of overly literary language as used by semiliterate or relatively un-

educated people, who tend to misspell through overcorrection in an

attempt to write "properly."'^

Probably the most spectacular— and the most humorous— of the

deliberate mutations practiced on language by our novelists is the

invention and use of words which do not exist. The author makes up

words and inserts them into a given context, and leaves it up to the

reader to decipher the (supposed) intended meaning. The acknowledged

master of this practice is Julio CortSzar, and the most famous example

is the lenguaje " gUgllco" which Rayuela ' s characters speak to each other

as a sort of verbal game. One sentence will suffice to illustrate the

game: "Apenas ^1 le amalaba el noema, a ella se le agolpaba elcllmiso y cafan en hidromurias, en salvajes ambonios, en sustalos exasperantes."'^

It is readily apparent that the subject is a sexual encounter between a man and a woman. At first glance, the passage seems incomprehensible. .

but such is not really the case, for Gort^zar has tied his exotic

non-words together with real, correct Spanish articles, prepositions,

pronouns and adjectives. ("Apenas ^1 le... el..., a el la se le,.

el ... y cafan en..., en salvajes..., en ... exasperantes.") Through

this linguistic restructuring, the reader's intelligence and fantasy

perceive and comprehend the general sense of the passage. The endings of this new language link us closely to Spanish; amalaba and agolpaba are obviously verbs in the imperfect tense, the remaining new.words are evidently nouns. So by carefully placing his fanciful words into an identifiable Spanish grammatical structure, Cort^zar creates the hilarious illusion of a unique, fanciful language, while at the same time probing the deeper recesses of Spanish's inner structures. This is exactly what Lewis Carrol did in his famous poem "Jabberwocky,"' in which he made a game out of language while (partially) destroying and re-forming it.

The idea of language as a game ( literatura Iddica) is central to the linguistic insurrection of today's Spanish American novel as it is directly tied to the writers' insistence that language should cease to be a sacred object, fixed forever in rigid forms. Cabrera Infante is in the forefront of this movement. He states:

For me, literature is a game, a complicated game, abstract and concrete at the same time, taking place on a physical plane— the page— and on the various mental planes of memory, imagination, and thought. A game not very different from chess but without the connotation of science-game which many people insist on conferring on chess, as a form of amusement and self-absorption at the same time. I always write for my own amusement and if afterwards there are readers Who can read what I write and be amused with me, beside me, I rejoice that we can share this diversion a posteriori.'' 78

By playing with words, he not only destroys theni in thsir present forms, but. alsp creates new forms at random, often grotesque, often hiimorous, often both simultaneously: "hacer el amor hacer el amor hacer el amor—

"^®; acerelamor aceleramo, acerela, acere.. . and one of the best-known examples: "...y me cordS [sic] de Alicia en. el Pats de las Maravillas y se lo di je al Bustroformidable y 61 se puso a recrear, a regalar:

Alicia en el mar de villas, Alicia en el Pafs que Mcis Brilla, Alicia en el Cine Maravillas, Avaricia en el Pats de las Malavillas, Malavidas,

Mavaricia, Marivia, Malicia, Milicia Milhizia Milhinda Milindia Milinda •

Malanda Malasia MaVesia Maleza Maldicia Malisa Alisia Alivia. Aluvia

Alluvia Alevilla y marlisa y marbrilla y maldevilla y empezd a cantar tomando como pie forzado (fdrzudo).... "'^ The object of this verbal game is to create new words and word groups with new and striking sounds and rhythms and meanings or suggestions of meanings. But most of all, it is a game to have fun with— a playtoy in the novelist's (and the reader's) hand, which, as Lisa Block rightly points out, requires a return to oral reading, for the full impact of the preceding variations on Alice in Wonderland can be appreciated only by reading the entire passage aloud or. by hearing it read.

CortSzar's Rayuela is full of language games. We have already seen the best-known of them, the rrirthful gltglico language. Cort^zar's characters also play a language game they call the "cemetery game" (el_ • juego en el cementerio ). The "cemetery" in this game is the Dictionary of the Roy.al Spanish Academy of the Language (which represents language in its most highly formalized, fixed form,, therefore the target of destructive humor). The game consists of opening the dictionary at 79

random, and making up a speech or story using as many of the words on that page as possible. The more rare, exotic or technical words, the better, for that is the point of the game— to show how useless the dictionary

(the repository of literary language) is. Oliveira gives us an example of the cemetery game (all of the words he uses really do exist):

"Hartos del cliente y de sus cleonasmos, le sacaron el clfbano y el clfpeo y.le hicieron tragar una clica. Luego le aplicaron un clistel cltnico en la cloaca, aunque clocaba por tan clivoso ascenso de agua mezclada con clinopodio, revolviendo los clisos como clerizdn clordtico."®'

Another game Cort^zar plays with the reader is in Chapter 34 of Rayuela in which two stories are told simultaneously. One is told on lines 1,

3, 5, 7, 9, etc.; the other on lines 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc. He does not warn the reader, however, and the reader is left to figure it out for himself. The reader must also decipher the apocopated words in the following: "...como lo sabe cualquiera que frecuente tertulias de espanoles o argentinos despu^s de la tercera copa / rica Latina buscando desde hace anos un camino: Lezama Lima, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa,. dos o tres mas apenas, han empezado a abrir picadas a machete limpio / tores mSs j6venes..."®* These abrupt changes give the impression of the author's mind as it jumps from one idea to the next. The game consists of following the train of thought and supplying the missing syllables to complete the words.

In another form of literatura ICidica , the Cuban novelist Severo

Sarduy plays a game with his reader which he calls "radial reading." In this reading, Sarduy writes an entire passage without ever mentioning the key word. He gives numerous clues from which the reader must guess

the missing key word. Sarduy gives us an example form his novel Cobra : 80

' —SI— anadifi el Facultativo— , los curanderos legeridarios que fundaron el Sikkim, para combatir el albarazo p blanca morfea, un herpes corrosivo, o ma's bien una lepra que atacaba al ganado, inyectaban a las reses un alcalbide del apio disuelto en agua frta. En las montanas los pastores usaban nieve. Poco a poco estos dltimos fueron descubriendo que los animales, despu^s de los enemas, al mismo tiempo que entraban en un sopor sin Ifmites, crecfan milagrosamente, y que ello, al contrario de todo lo previsto, estaba en relacidn directa no con la cantidad del extracto, sino con la del disolvente. Asf se formfi la raza de los yacks, esos bdfalos mansos que adn hoy en dfa recorren las mesetas del Asia Central, siguiendo a los monjes peregrinos. El cambio morfologico que pretendemos puede obtenerse, y ello sin que Pup abandone los brazos de Morfeo: basta con inyectarle eh las venas nieve. ®^

In order to decipher the passage, the reader must discover the missing key

word, which is morfina . A-1 though never mentioned, morfina is suggested

by (1) morfolgqico/morfea (a sickness )/Morfeo; (2) alcaloide del apio

(read: alcaloide del opio nieve (slang ); (3) name for the drug), blanca ;

and (4) inyectarle en las venas. These are the "radial" clues which

lead to the central word, morfina , and to discover the missing link is the reader's task.

In conclusion, the language of the novel has risen from being an accessory, traditional means of expression, to one of central concern to the novelist. This preoccupation has taken and continues to take multiple directions, but the desire to reform the literary Spanish language is so pervasive among today's Spanish American novelists that

' it is a unifying nexus. Vargas Llosa concludes that the search for new linguistic forms of expression in many of today's writers has led to works which are, more than anything, linguistic experiments, novels whose heroes are not men, but rather words. ^^ Cabrera Infante, in response to the question "What does literary creation mean to yoii?", answers

"«** simply: "Words, words, words. Suchis the overpowering importance of language in today's Spanish American novel. 81

N0TE5

^Fuentes, La nueva novel a hispanoamericana , pp. 30-35.

^Ibid., pp. 93-94.

Hhid.y p. 30.

Mbid., p. 94.

^S^bato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 32.

^As Scibato points out, this subservience extends all the way to copying peninsular Spanish mistakes, such as the often-heard "les invitamos a escuchar" on Spanish American radio and television programs; these announcers are taking as a sign of refinement and elegance what is really no more than a peninsular confusion between the dative pronoun les and the accusative los .

^Sgbato," El escritor y sus fantasmas . p. 216.

8 Ibid., pp. 219-220.

'Ibid.i pp. 220-221.

^"Fuentes, La nueva novel a hispanoamericana , pp. 31-32.

^'Ibid., pp. 94-95.

'^Ibid., p. 32.

^^Ibid., pp. 32-33

^•Scibato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 243.

*^Fuentes, "Situacidh del escritor en America Latina," p. 17.

^Mbid.. pp. 20-21.

^'Julio Cortcizar, Rayuela , llth ed. (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969), p. 503.

^^Carrnen Rivelli, "Entrevistaa Eduardo Mallea en Buenos Aires," Hispania , March 1971, pp. 193-194.

^^GonzSlez Bermejo, Cosas de escritores , p. 99.

^''Margarita Garcfa Flores, "Siete respuestas de Julio CortSzar," Revista de la Universidad de Mexico, March 1967, p. 11. 82

2Mbid.:

^^Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana , p. 30.

^^Guibert, Seven Voices, p. 136.

^''Fuentes, La n ueva novela hispanoamericana , pp. 24-26.

^^Lisa Block de Behar, Anglisis de un lenguaje en crisis (Montevideo: Nuestra Tierra, 1969), pp. 35-53.

^*In Borges: El lenguaje de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Emec6, 1965).

^'In this section and the remaining sections of this chapter, we shall be following the general outlines of the previously mentioned study of language in today's Spanish American novel, Lisa Block de Behar 's Angflisis de un lenguaje en c risis . Lisa Block's book is an excellent approach to the subject of language. It is well-planned, logical in development and well-illustrated with examples from contemporary novels. Therefore, we wish at this point to acknowledge our indebtedness to this book. We shall be following the characteristics that Lisa Block lists as representative, and reinforce her categories with" material we have drawn directly from our authors.

^^Harss, Into the Mainstream , p. 271.

^'Block, op. cit., pp. 89-91.

'"Guibert, op. cit., p. 410.

^^Guillermo Cabrera Infante, "Las fuentes de la narracidn,"

Mundo Nuevo , July 1968, pp. 43-44.

^^Guillermo Cabrera Infante, "Epilogue for Late(nt) Readers,"

Review , (Winter 71/Spring 72), p. 25.

33ibid., pp. 25-26.

^'Carlos Fuentes, "On TTTj" Review (Winter 71/Spring 72), p. 22.

^^Cabrera Infante, "Epilogue for Late(nt) Readers," p. 28.

'^Harss, op. cit., pp. 77-78.

^'We shall dedicate an entire section of Chapter VI to the novelists' use of humor.

^^Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana , p. 46.

^^Ibid,, p. 56. 83

""Ibid.,

-^Ibid., p. 72.

''^Ibid., p. 85.

ii3: Jean Michel Fossey, "Miguel. Angel Asturias on Literature," Arts in Society . 5, No. 2 (Summer-Fall 1953), p. 354; Manuel M. Azana and Claude Mie, "Entrevista con Miguel Angel Asturias, Premio N6bel," Bulletin Hispanique . January-June 1968, p. 139; Harss, op. cit., pp. 81-85.

'*''Oscar Collazos et al. , Literatura ei^ la revolucidn y revol ucidn €n la literatura "~ , 2nd ed. (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1971T, p, 12.

•fS Carpentier, Tientos y diferencias , pp. 37-38.

>f6< Carpentier's dislike of the nouveau roman movement, incidentally, is widely shared among today's Spanish American novelists, who consider it too limiting and too impersonal.

<»7 Reynaldo Gonzalez, "Un pulpo en una jarra minoana," p. 15.

^^Gonzaiez Bermejo, op. cit., pp. 130-132.

^^Harss," op. cit., p. 271.

si'Block, op. cit., pp. 117-118.

^^Harss, op. cit., p. 274.

'^Scibato, El escritor y sus fantasmas . pp. 210-214.

"Ibid., p. 213.

^"Ibid.

"Ibid., p. 214.

"Ibid., p. 38.

5 7- The first part of this statement ^ ^ seems highly debatable. We find n impossible to believe that Shakespeare and Dante were unaware of the beauty of their verse.

^^Sabato, El^ escritor ^ sus fantasmas , pp. 207-208.

^^Harss, op. cit., p. 336.

^"Guibert, op. cit., p. 417.

^^Cortgzar, Rayuela , pp. 538-539. 84

"Ibid., p. 539.

^^Harss, op. cit., p. 234.

^'*Santana, "La vuelta a CortSzar en 80 rounds," p. 9.

^^Cortcizar, Rayuela , p. 500.

^^From La vuelta a1 dta en ochenta mundos , quoted in Block, op. cit., p. 56.

^^Gui 11 ermo Cabrera Infante, Tres tristes tigres , 2nd.ed, (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971), p. 46.

"Ibid., p. 208.

«9ibid., p. 386.

^"Cort^zar, Rayuela . p. 506.

'Mbid., p. 379

'^Cabrera Infante, Tres tristes tigres , p. 209.

i^'Cortcizar, Rayuela , p. 473.

"*Ibid., p. 430

'^Block, op. cit., pp. 69-70.

'^Cortlzar, Rayuela , p. 428.

''Guibert, op. cit., p. 408.

'^Cabrera Infante, Tres tristes tigres , p. 325.

'Mbid., p. 209.

^**Cortgzar, Rayuela , p. 279.

^ ^^Cortazar, Ultimo roundy p. 143, "primer piso."

^^Cited in Emir Rodriguez Monegal, "Conversacidn con Severo Sarduy,"

Revista de Occidente , December 1970, pp. 329-330.

^^Mario Vargas LI osa, "The Latin American Novel Today: Introduction,"

Books Abroad , 44, No. 1 (Winter 1970), p. 10.

^"Guibert, op. cit. , p. 407. CHAPTER III

FORM, TECHNIQUE AND STYLE IN THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

The "Total" Novel; the "Open" Novel

In the preceding chapter, we noted that Fuentes, in commenting on

the language in Carpentier's novels, said that the, contemporary novel

strives for total language, for going beyond traditional word structures-,

just as contemporary music strives to be total sound, going beyond the

traditional structural elements of melody and harmony. This "total"

language that today's novelists are seeking is the instrument which they feel to be the most adequate to achieve what is commonly referred to as the "total novel."* It is a concept of the novel shared by the majority of today's novelists in Spanish America, and, consequently, it is important to define its structure.

The hidden forces in Spanish American literature present ever since the conquest have now flowered, according to Lezama Lima, opening the possibilities of a comprehensive open novel. The chroniclers of the conquest, for example, had the ability to synthesize the ancestral and the new, the mythical and the real. This ability serves today's novelist well, he says, for in today's literature, here and now no longer limit us to a given time and space. Here means planetary unity and now means the flying point of time, liberation from time, thus breaking the shackles of the old novel's taboos. The Spanish American novel today, he states, is neither strictly a novel nor Spanish American, but rather what he terms

85 ^ . -

"el relate supraverbo de To entrevisto, la fiesta del nacimiento de

nuevos sentidos." The contemporary novel opens up new vistas, new ways of focusing on the totality of human. experience. If we can achieve

that goal, he says, the novel will be so compelling that, despite its

lack of traditional form and content, it will force the reader to accept it

as a novel and as a new paradigm of the novel form.

Ernesto Scibato traces' the ideal of the total novel" back to. the

beginnings of the novel. He says that historically, all- the great

novels have been attempts to be total novels in the sense that they

presented the widest' possible view of mankind and the human condition.

From Cervantes to Proust and Joyce, the novel has constantly sought to expand its vision. In the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Scibato finds

drama, portraits, dialogue, descriptions of scenery, fantasy and

reality, poetry and the most humble peasant language; ideas, good and evil, scenes of family life, and other elements which contributed toward creating as total a picture as possible of the society he was trying to

capture in his novels. Today's novel, in Slbato's view, must- be even more wide-ranging, still more comprehensive, by incorporating the functions which in the past belonged exclusively to the epic, poetry and confessions, the moral treatise and the essay. Such a broad-based construct is easier to achieve in the twentieth century, due to the fact that today the novel is no longer limited by the scientific, positivistic tenets of the nineteenth-century narrative. Today's novel can present a total view, not only of the outside world, but also of the inside world of man's mind, reaching into the deepest strata of the unconscious (e.g.,

the hallucinatory "Informe sobre ciegos" in SSbato's Sobre heroes y 87

tumbas ) . The contemporary novel is a hybrid product which looks into

the world of light and the world of shadows, reason and instincts, the

rational and the irrationals fantasy and everyday reality, the worlds

of magic and mythology. The goal of the novelist is to create an

artistic synthesis of as many of these elements as possible. Today's

novel, Scibato states, tends toward becoming what he calls a "metaphysical

poem"— "metaphysical" in that it delves into the ultimate nature of

reality on an intellectual, abstract plane; a "poem" because it is

man's (the novelist's) subjective view of the subject, without pre-

tensions of scientific precision or truth. Today's novel, unlike its

predecessors, does not seek to demonstrate or prove anything as a

scientist would— it wishes only to show what exists, as completely

as possible, "but always with the realization that the viewpoint is

subjective.'* In such a total view of the world, the novel easily goes beyond the old literary dilemmas which were so restricting simply because

they w?re perceived as mutually exclusive categories: e.g., the

"social" versus the "psychological" novel. There is no reason why a total novel cannot synthesize both points of view. The role of the contemporary novelist, then, is to integrate into a cohesive whole as many facets of the complex reality of the modern world as he can.

Scibato cites James Joyce's Ulysses as an illustration of what he

"^ is proposing, a form he calls a "jigsaw novel. In Ulysses , Joyce presents fragments which have little or no chronological or narrative coherence among themselves, fragments of a complicated jigsaw puzzle which will remain unfinished because many of its parts are missing, while others remain half-hidden in the shadows, glimpsed only briefly 88

or vaguely by the reader. This is no arbitrary game, however. ; It is

a vision which reflects our perception of reality in life: the stream

of consciousness which simultaneously admits fragments from the many

. diverse segments of the reality which surrounds us, creating a confusing

total mosaic which is the reality we experience at a given moment. The

traditional novel normally chooses one facet out of the mosaic. The

contemporary novel, like Joyce ' s Ulysses , attempts , insofar as it is

possible, to include all. When it does, it will be realistic in the

best, most far-reaching sense of that term.

The attempt to present a total view of reality creates a novel

characterized by complexity, difficulty, and even obscurity. The novel

is no longer two-dimensional and linear, it is three-dimensional and

follows many diverging paths and patterns.^

Such a multifaceted narrative is embodied in. the chivalric novel,

according to Vargas Llosa. He states that for the writers of chivalric

novels, reality was a multi-faceted thing which consisted of everything

that existed (exterior reality— the daily life of the medieval castles),

the rational and the irrational, real beings of flesh, and blood in their

many emotional states (love, hate, sorrow, happiness, etc. ), and beings

which existed only in the collective imagination and terror of the

age, such as fabulous monsters, dragons or fairies. The creators of

these novels of chivalry had a total view of reality. They did not

exclude anything, and were completely unconcerned with the "scientific"

provability of phenomena. This is the all-encompassing view that today's

novelist must have in order to create a total novel. ^ As Vargas Lldsa

puts it:. "Es que...la novela es el Cinico g^nero donde el factor 89

cuaTititativo es tan importante cdmo el cualitativo: mjentras mcis hiveles de la realidad, mientras mcis pianos de la experiencia humana puedas apresar, mSs profunda, m^s rica y ambiciosa serS tu novela."^

Vargas Llosa goes on to say that a novel which limits its scope to a single facet of reality—the psychological novel, for example—mutilates the reality which it attempts to portray, in that it cuts off a wide band of experiences. and perceptions which are not strictly psychological.

The novel should seek not to limit or deform reality but to expand it.

That is precisely what Vargas Llosa says he attempted to do in La

ciudad" y los perros , working always with the total vision of the chivalric novel in mind. In writing his first novel, he states that he tried to focus on a given reality through multiple viewpoints— each viewpoint being embodied in a different character. Thus Alberto "el poeta" is a sensitive, perceptive boy; "Boa" is a vicious, instinctive, almost animal-like ruffian, etc. Each of these diverse characters acts as a prism, breaking down the external "reality" into subjective viewpoints, colored by the personality and mentality of each character. In this way, Vargas Llosa hoped to show not only the irreality of an objective "reality" but the multiple planes of what is perceived as reality.^ He sums up his idea of the total novel as follows:

I think every method, every procedure must be by conditioned the fictional material at hand. The . best novels are alv/ays those that exhaust their material, that don't throw a single light on reality but many. The points of view that can be brought to bear on reality are infinite. It's impossible, of course, for any novel to exhaust all of them. But a novel will be greater and vaster in proportion to the number of levels of reality it presents In more recent times there has been a sort of decadence, a shrivel- ing of the novel. Modern ventures into the novel form 90

attempt to give only a single vision, to portray a single aspect of reality. I'm in favor of the opposite: the all -encompassing novel that aspires ; to embrace reality in all its facets, in all its manifestations. It can'never fulfill itself at all levels. But the greater its diversity, the broader the vision of reality, the more complete the novel will be. ^^

Vargas Llosa sees this desire to totally recreate' reality in the novel

as being a total rejection of present-day reality in Latin America. He

believes that European and North American novelists rarely attempt to . write a "total" novel nowadays because the crises which are agitating

their societies are not nearly so profound as those shaking the yery foundations of Latin American society today. The Latin American novelist rejects completely his contemporary society, and that is why he must recreate his own version of reality in the novel. ^* For Vargas Llosa, the perfect example of a total novel is Gabriel Garcfa Mgrquez's Cien anos de soledad . It describes a total reality, a self-contained world from its birth to its death in all its multiple manifestations—the individual and the collective, the legendary and the historical, daily and mythical reality. ^^ '

The most outspoken advocate of giving the concept of the novel a wider, more far-reaching, more "liberal" interpretation is Julio

CortSzar. He proposes that the novel should be open to all sorts of

"extra! iterary" influences. He asks how long we must go on clinging to the antiquated ideas of libraries and books (as we presently define them).

While he derides the "scholars" in their ivory towers who are scandalized by any attempt to bring extral iterary subject matter or form into the novel, CortSzar claims such freedom to be his and every other novelist's 91

right, equating it with the daring gesture of Prometheus when he stole fire from, the gods of his day.^' He says, for example, that as he writes, the' central theme on which he is concentrating his attention functions as a lightning rod, attracting to it not only those topics directly related to the central theme, but also others indirectly or tangentially related, or even completely unrelated. These "peripheral" themes, which to some may seem "unliterary," form something like a circle around the central theme. CortSzar states that for him, the only honorable solution is to accept these peripheral themes as integral parts of the novel, and incorporate them as passages or fragments of

the novel, as he did in Rayuela , in which many of the so-called "dis- pensable chapters" (as well as some of the "indispensable chapters") were of this peripheral or extraliterary nature.^"* In fact, Cortlizar says he is more and more interested in what he calls "literature of exceptions" nowadays. He finds the exceptions more interesting than the laws. He says that the poet should dedicate himself to the exceptions and leave the laws to the scientists and the "serious" writers (the term "serious writers," as used by CortSzar, is derogatory, denoting lack of imagination and inventiveness). He states that exceptions "offer what I call an opening or a fracture, and also, in a sense, a hope.

I'll go into my grave without having lost the hope that one morning the sun will rise in the west. It exasperates me with its obedience and obstinacy, things that wouldn't bother a classical writer all that much. "^5

CortSzar believes that the novel is the genre which best lends itself to this openness or totality. He states that the short story 92

and the theater, for example, are restricted by reasons of esthetic

obligation to deal with a subject on a more limited basis. To show

us an ant, he says, these genres must lift it out of the anthill and

show it to us isolated. The novel, due to its traditional lack of

strict rules of form and of a precise definition, is freer to show us

the ant within its anthill, to give us the totality of the subject

under consideration. In fact, it is precisely the anti literary

characteristics of the novel, its lack of restrictions to rigid rules,

which enable the novel to move in such new and interesting directions. ^^

It is this freedom from "literary" shackles that CortSzar hopes to

expand to its outer limits and even beyond.

Other writers echo Cortcizar's opinions, but develop aspects of

novelistic theory of special interest to them. Vargas Llosa, for example, is fascinated by the melodrama and truculence of the Mexican equivalent of our "soap-operas." Although he considers such. melodrama highly unliterary, Vargas Llosa notes that it represents an integral part of the daily reality of Latin American life. In his view, a great part of the Latin American people love, hate, dream,, suffer, marry, divorce, make friends and enemies just as in the most lachrymose soap- operas. These soap-operas respond to a basic trait of the Latin American character, he believes, and for that reason he would like to experiment with melodrama in future novels.*'

Another facet of the open novel is investigated by Cabrera Infante, whose view of literature is that of a game, as we have previously noted.

He opens his writings to the vagaries of chance. He tells us that as his books take shape, he has retained typing errors from the rough draft or 93

galley.proof errata, because such random. errors seem to him to be in the spirit of the book and contribute to its "playful" nature.^*'

similar vein. Severe Sarduy, the- contemporary Cuban novelist, . In a

has developed the notion of a "galactic" novel , another variation of the open novel concept. The "galactic" novel Would be similar to a nebula of information composed only of- fragments, quoting other texts or even

itself. Citing from his own novel Cobra, Sarduy states that he uses entire pages from other books, and other pages from earlier chapters of Cobra itself. It is foreseeable that the. final chapter of the book would be composed of quotes from the rest of the book, thus creating a sort of internal literary collage .'^

These are only a few of the examples of how today's novelists are

seeking to implement the ideal of a total, open novel. This movement responds to what Carlos Fuentes calls the "vision of life as accident and variety outside the monolithic demands of a static history and a fixed geography."^" "Accident" and "variety" are the key words, here,

in that they denote the idea that in life, everything is possible, everything is feasible. In today's Latin American world, reality is of overpowering epic proportions, and the novel must be of epic proportions and possibilities also, as Carpentier says.^^ To express these dimensions, the novel needs to expand its frontiers in all sorts of directions so that it can give voice to the totality of human experience as we know it.

Technique

Novelistic technique becomes very important to the contemporary writer, because in order to make his novel adhere to the concepts of 94

openness and totality as expressed in the preceding section, he must

seek new ways of writing. The "how" becomes as important as- the "what."

Literary techniques become the tools for translating theoretical ideas

into novels. ^^

On the question of technical innovations, Oscar Collazos speaks

of today's Latin American authors' innate inferiority complex, whereas

Julio CortSzar denies its existence. ^^ Cort^zar agrees that such was the case formerly, but he claims that today there is no longer anything foreign in the matter of literary techniques. The shrinking of our planet' through mass communications, the translations of works which follow the original almost immediately, and the increased contact among writers of many different nations have gone far toward eliminating the stagnated compartments into which national literatures used to be divided. Literature operates on a more universal plane today, although that certainly does not mean that a Mexican novel is indistinguishable from a French novel. The different cultural backgrounds and sensitivities of the Mexican and French novelist will always make their works their own. But in the matter of the formal mechanisms of techniques, there ' is a growing universality or simultaneity of creation and usage. The experimental field here is world-wide, and new literary techniques

spread rapidly. CortSzar cites Vargas Llosa's La casa verde , saying that technically, there is nothing comparable in Europe, and that he would not be at all surprised to find European authors using its formal structure as the basis for their new novels.

It is not unexpected that it is Vargas Llosa who has had the most to say in regard to novelistic technique. In a variety of sources, he 95

has spelled out many of the most salient techniques used today. His study of the novel called La novel a lists the three which he considers to be the most significant.^** The first is the technique he calls los vasos comunicantes. This consists of joining together in one novel or short story events, characters and situations that actually occur in quite different times and places. Each separate situation then contributes its particular tensions, emotions and experiences; and, from the fusion of these disparate elements there arises a new living essence

( vivencia ) which, because it is disturbing and/or strange, gives the artistic illusion of life. Vargas Llosa says that this technique is quite common in the medieval novels of chivalry^ and he uses it exten-

sively in his own novel La casa verde . .

A second technique, which has existed as long as the novel, is that

of the cajas chinas . When one opens a Chinese box, he finds a smaller box inside. When he opens that one, he finds one even smaller. This process can go on (theoretically at least) indefinitely. This technique, applied to literature, is best represented by the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade, the narrator, would always finish one story with a lead-in to another story, so that one tale meshed with the next. Each story contained the seeds for another just as each

Chinese box contains another. This technique v/as extensively used by

Cervantes, whose Don Quixote includes many tales peripheral to the novel's development, but which evolved naturally from the principal narration.

The third technique which Vargas Llosa cites is one which he calls the sal to cualitativo. This one consists of a crescendo accumulation 96

of elements and tensions until there is a sudden and unexpected change

in the nature of artistic reality. Vargas Llosa illustrates the

technique with an example from Juan Martorell's chivalric novel

Tirante el Blanco. In this novel , there is an episode in which

Tirante el Blanco is engaged in a duel with the knight Quigueleison de Montalbln. The narration at first is straightforward, realistic, almost photographic. The author goes into, great descriptive detail concerning the knight's steeds and armor, the grandstands and the colorful dress of those observing the combat. There is a very realistic blow-by-blow description of the beginning of the combat. But as the duel is prolonged, the narrative focus turns from the two combatants to the surrounding scene, and suddenly the reader finds that the trees and the people in the stands all around can hardly be distinguished from the shadows. Finally, they fade from view as the duel continues.

Then the reader understands that twilight and then darkness have over- taken the duel, that the duel has been going on for hours, although the author never says so explicitly. The light then reappears and it is once again day; then successively night and day, and night and day.

All of which means that the duel, begun in a very realistic, credible manner, is now being prolonged through a highly unrealistic, almost impossible length of time. Thus, the author has taken a salto cualitativo without actually interrupting his narration.

These three early techniques— the vasos comunicante s, the cajas chinas and the' salto cualitativo-^are all found throughout the history of the novel, as far back as the chivalric narrative. Vargas Llosa points out several additional techniques, some more contemporary in 97

origin, which today's novelists are using. One of these Is the montage

of dialogues which occur In different times and spaces. This Is an

• putgrowth of the yasos comunlcantes , and Is evident In many of the

contemporary novels of Spanish America. The Peruvian novelist says that In using this technique he was attempting to break the law of causality v1s-a-v1s chronological and spatial sequence. Not only does this open

' up all sorts of possibilities for recomblning the separate events, but

It forces the reader to put together for himself, as he sees fit, the events narrated. ^^

Another technique that Vargas Llosa advocates is the subordination

of nature to man. He states- that one of the main weaknesses of the traditional Spanish American novel was its failure to understand that

the novel must always be about man and not about nature. In the tradi-

tional novel, nature too often dominated and overshadowed man. He states;

"Todo puede entrar en una novelasiempre y cuando. de una manera u otra, est§ condicionado, subordinado a la experiencia humana."^^ So nature

must play a secondary rather than a primary role in the novel. It should be a projection of man. Vargas Llosa says he has attempted to Implement this rule by incorporating nature only insofar as it can explain, clarify

or enrich the human story in the novel. Nature used in this manner is.

just the opposite of nature in Dona Barbara , for example, in which the human characters seem mere extensions of the natural setting. In La casa verde, he observes, nature exists in relation to man, and not vice-versa. Vargas Llosa also advocates using multiple points of view, particularly, the technique of perspectivlsm-the recounting of a story from the viewpoint of several characters. Each character, of course, perceives 98

people and events in different ways. Vargas Llosa says that this

technique allows the author to avoid rigidity and gives him great

flexibility and freedom in manipulating the characters and the events

of the narration. It also avoids the superficial overview and gives

complexity to the narrative (a key component of the desired "total

novel"). ^' This use of multiple points of view is echoed by Ernesto

Sabato, who employs- it extensively in his novel Sobre heroes y tumbas .

He indicates he is \/ery fond of using such phrases as "Martin dijo que

Alexandra dijo," giving the reader second-, or even third-hand infor-

mation,- which has been "strained" (and possibly distorted) by the

perceptions of the intervening narrator or narrators. SSbato calls

this "narration to the second (or third) power." He uses it because it

gives ambiguity and uncertainty to the material related, which, is more

the way things happen in real life than is the case with an omniscient

narrator relating The Way Things Happen as absolute truth (as in the

nineteenth-century novel). In the contemporary novel , the reader must

sort out what he believes to be a (relatively) accurate recounting of the

events from the colored versions presented by the different characters.

SSbato says that for the same reason and for the same effect, he mixes past, present and future. While man lives in the present, he constantly remembers and calls on the past for examples, and continually projects toward the future. In fact, he belongs to the three times simultaneously.

By mixing them in the novel, SSbato hopes to achieve a similar coexistence of the?e three times. As with the multiple point of view, this technique creates ambiguity, forcing the reader to sort out the course of events. ^^ 99

We saw earlier, in our discussion of the total novel , how Vargas

LI osa advocates the use of as many planes of reality as possible to

achieve as broad a view as possible of the events narraterl. He also .

practices a technique he calls the- corte continuo . He notes^^ that a work of fiction can never be more than a minute portion of the reality it seeks to represent— the tip of the iceberg, as Hemingway put it. The writer is forced to select those relatively few events and characters which will go toward making up his narrative. The corte continuo helps by fusing into a narrative unity causes and effects. Thus, events are explained not through a chronological sequence based first on cause, then on process and, eventually, final results (which may occur ten years later), but rather by cutting across all the intervening space and time and placing cause and final effect side by side in the novel. If the missing links of such a narration confuse the reader, well and good, for it gives him participation in the novel.

A further technique is the restructuring of dialogue (referred to as acotacign dramltica ). We have already seen one example of how Vargas

Llosa reshapes dialogue, eliminating all references to the speakers

(see page 60). He states that he regards the traditional dialogue indicators (such as "Dijo, poniendo una cara ICigubre," or "Dijo, levantando el brazo parsimoniosamente") as worn-out fossils which interrupt the smooth flow of the reading of the dialogue. The reading should be as smooth as the oral act of dialogue itself. In seeking a more dynamic, creative alternative to traditional forms, Vargas Llosa often substitutes the thoughts of the speaker (which may or may not coincide with what he is saying) or the reactions of the listener. By 100

so doing, he hopes to create an overview of the situation in which the

dialogue occurs, including the emotions and reactions of the characters

who participate in the dialogue, without having to directly indicate,

such reactions to the reader.^"

Vargas Llosa discusses another technical problem which arose

while he was writing La ciudad y los perros , and which he finally solved

by using a variation on' the technique of using multiple points of view—

the technique of employing a third party (or intermediary) as narrator.'*

The problem arose when the author approached the scenes which contain

considerable shock value— for example, the scenes of collective

masturbation, the episode involving the rape of a chicken or the attempt

to violate one of the boys. These scenes were indispensable to the

portrayal of dormitory life in the military school. But Vargas Llosa

says he found a straightforward recounting of such events always turned

out to be unreal or unconvincing because of their exorbitance, their

gratuitous violence and savagery. For him, reality cannot be bodily

transplanted into literature as the nineteenth-century realists attempted.

to do. In. order to make these scenes viable and to cushion the shock to

the reader, he hit upon the idea of presenting them through a third person intermediary. He chose a roving spectator, an unintellectual one, for he did not want the intermediary to rationalize or explain the violence. The character he created to reveal the degenerate, horrible aspect of the school- is Boa, who, to some extent, is the personification of that horror (Boa has sexual relations with a dog himself). Through the use of Boa, Vargas Llosa hopes to soften the impact so that the reader will not reject the violence outright, as well he might if it 101

were related by Alberto "el poeta," the protagonist, whose character is too foreign to such monstrous acts. Vargas Llosa's use of an intermediary narrator responds to his belief that reality must be transformed, before it is presented to the reader. Otherwise, he says, reality may die on the (writer's) operating table.

The problem of the narrator has also preoccupied Guillermo Cabrera

Infante, particularly in his novel Tres tristes tigres? ^ As we have seen, in this novel Cabrera Infante attempts to produce a "gallery of voices," rather than a traditional narration. In order to reproduce the voices, he says he found the first person narration to be the only adequate technical vehicle. The problem with this solution is that many readers automatically associate a first person narrator with the author of the book, and assume that such a book is autobiographical. Cabrera

Infante warns against that assumption, saying that there is no more reason to suppose that a first person (in contrast with a third person) narrator is the author. However, he considers such erroneous conclusions as probably inevitable, citing Somerset Maugham's similar experience with first person narrative. The narrator, he emphasizes, is as much a creation of the author's imagination as are all the other characters and situations in the book.^^ Vargas Llosa,' however, disagrees with Cabrera Infante's assertion that his novel (or any other) is not at all autobiographical;

Vargas Llosa asserts that, to a certain degree, all novels are autobiographical.^'* The novel, he says, is like a strip-tease in which the novelist gets up and takes off his clothes in front of his readers.

But the novelist must transform his experiences— he cannot simply sit down and relate his life. He must transpose his vital experiences 102

through his owi particular sensitivities, using whatever techniques

seem appropriate to the case, in ofder to make of his novel a work

of art rather than merely a "strip-tease" act. It is through the

artistic transformation that the work takes on value and life of its

own, and moves away from autobiography and factual events. This is

the function of "technique"— to transpose the artist's personal

experiences into an autonomous, independent work of art.

Surrealism has also suggested new techniques to the Latin American novelist, particularly, as we saw earlier, the technique of automatic writing. Miguel Angel Asturias uses this technique extensively, and sees It as a way of opening up avenues of expression to the subconscious and unconscious portions- of man's mind.^^ He says that all of his novels, with the exception of the carefully planned El senor

presidente , benefited at least partially from the technique of automatic writing. He tells us that he would go over and over a story in his mind until its basic outlines were well fixed. Then he would sit down at the typewriter and let himself go, putting down anything and everything that crossed his mind, no matter how chaotic or incoherent.

When he finished, he would put what he had written aside for a month

or so, then go back and cut and add as he saw fit. . The great benefit which results from automatic writing, he says, is (as we saw before) the new and sometimes startling juxtapositions of words. ^^

Two additional techniques are discussed by the Chilean novelist

Josg Donoso, in relation to his novel El obsceno pgjaro de la noche .

One is the use of interior monologue— hardly innovative in itself.

However, Donoso uses it so that sometimes the reader is unsure of .

103

which character is doing the thinking or speaking in the interior

monologue, since more than one character is involved therein. This

leads to ambiguity, forcing the reader to supply missing links and to

identify speakers.- The same result is obtained through the use of

symbols stripped of their meaning— the second technique which concerns

us here. Donoso says that symbols mean nothing to him, that he wants

them to be "dynamic, vague, ambiguous, opaque.""

The technique of hyperbole in the stories and novels of Garcta

M^rquez is discussed by Vargas Llosa.^^ He cites as ah example the short

story ''Los funerales de la Mamci Grande" .in which the narrator situates

himself, not on the level of fact, but rather on the level of popular

imagination, belief and exaggeration. The voice of the narrator is

like that of a street crier, as he begins the story "Esta es,

incrldulos del mundo entero..." and continues "...es la hora de

recostar un taburete a la puerta de la calle y empezar a contar

. desde el principio los pormenores de esta conmocidn nacional, antes

de que tengan_tiempo de llegar los historiadores. " Then the narrator

sets out to tell the story of Big Mama's funeral, complete with all the

wild exaggerations and embellishments of the popular or street version,

without the strict truthfulness that would be required by historians,

who will no doubt later record their version of the event. This

approach leads to a "marvelous" version of the event, which Garcfa Mlrquez

amplifies in his "marvelous" novel Cien afios de soledad .^^ At any rate,

hyperbole plays a major role as a technique in the development not only

of the marvelous view of reality but also in the development of humor

in today's Spanish American noveT. 104

Another technique, utilized particularly by Ernesto Sabato and

Julio Cortcizar, is what they refer to as "brink situations." Scfbato says that modern man lives at a very high. pressure, constantly faced with his own annihilation and death, with loneliness and psychic torture.

Man today experiences extreme situations, and faces the farthest limits of his own existence. In order to describe this state of mind, literature must create exceptional situations which place the. reader in the same tension and crisis in which the characters of a novel find themselves. This is the case with the characters in the novels of

Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Greene, Lagerkvist and Kafka, and must be the case with any truly great writer of our times. '*" Cortcizar agrees.

He thinks that brink situations, among other virtues, have the advantage of heightening the reader's interest. They create a fierce inner tension which the reader cannot elude; they traumatize him.

CortSzar explains:

Brink situations are the best method I know for the author first, then the reader, to be able to dissociate, to take a leap out of himself. In other words, if the characters are stretched tight as bows, at the point of the highest tension, then there's the possibility of something like an illumination. I think the chapter about the wooden board in Rayuela is the one that best illustrates that. There I'm violating all the laws of conmon sense. But precisely because I'm violating those laws by placing my characters and therefore also the reader in an almost unbearable position.. .at that moment

I can really get across what I want to say. What t was trying to say in the chapter of the wooden board is that at that moment Traveler and Oliveira have a sudden complete meeting of minds. '•^

This revelation comes about as a result of the extreme tension built up in that chapter. To relieve the tension, CortSzar turns to the traditional outlet of comic relief,, although the comedy in this and most other brink 105

situations is a grim, uneasy humor. Cbrt.^zar says: "The chapter of the wooden board, I think* is one of the deepest moments in the book.

Because lives are in the balance. Yet, from beginning to end, it's

"''^ treated as a wild joke. "

A technique that is receiving wide support among the contemporary

Spanish American novelists, and which we have mentioned in passing on several occasions, is strongly advocated by Cortcizar. This is the idea, of making the reader an active participant in thecreation of a novel, forcing him to abandon his passive role. Cortcizar refers to

this idea as the "accomplice reader" ( el lector c6mplice ), the con-

trary of which— the traditional reader who passively read and . credulously absorbed— he disparagingly refers to as the "female

reader" ( lector-hembra ) or "swallow reader" ( lector-alondra ). For

Cortcizar, involving. the reader actively in the process of literary creation is one of the most fundamental elements of the contemporary novel. The fictional Morelli has very definite opinions on the subject, ftorelli says that in general, all novelists hope that their readers will understand them, participate in their experiences, or receive whatever message is contained in the work. The romantic novelist wants to be understood; the classical novelist seeks to teach a lesson. Morelli-

CortSzar suggests a new, third possibility: making an accomplice of the reader. This requires that the reading of the novel abolish the time system of the reader and transpose him into the time system of the author. In this way, the reader will be able to become a coparticipant

and "co-sufferer" ( coparticipe y copadeciente ) of the novelist's experience. This process involves the novelist's giving the reader ^

106

something like a facade with windows and doors behind which a mystery

is unfolding. The reader then must search for the mystery (hence his

complicity) and .it is quite possible that he will not find it (hence

his "co-suffering"). Whatever the author of such a novel may achieve

for himself will be repeated, perhaps even magnified, in the accomplice

readej— a result much to be desired. As for the lector-hembra , he (or

she) will not look beyond the fa9ade, where comedies and tragedies of

the honnite homme can still be satisfactorily played out. In this way,

both groups will be pleased, although it is clear that CortSzar-Morelli

prefers the accomplice reader. '*V In another note, Morelli confesses

that the only character in a novel who interests him is the reader,

to the extent that what he may write will in some way help to change

him, displace" him, upset him, alienate him."** In still another note,**

Morelli says that the material the novelist provides' to the reader is

like a series of photographs or still lifes. It would be the reader's

task to invent the bridges which would create a coherent whole out of

this series of disarticulated stills, which might include, a character's

way of combing his hair or the reasons for a character's conduct or

lack of it. The novel so conceived would be similar to a series of

Gestalt drawings, in which certain existing lines would induce the

observer to trace imaginary forms which would complete the figures.

Often, the missing iines turn out to be more important than the

existing ones. Thus it should be in the novel— the links supplied by the reader's imagination would be the most important components of

"^ the novel. 107

Vargas Llosa, while echoing Gort^zar's thesis, states that for

him, the novel is the supreme genre because it installs the reader at

the very heart of the reality evoked in the book and keeps him there,

forcing him to participate. in the book's action. He says that the

authors he admires are those who sweep him off his feet and throw him

into their (ndvelistic) world, not those who keep the reader at a distance."^ Vargas Llosa points out a very interesting variation on

the "accomplice reader" technique used by Garcfa M5rquez. In his

short story "La siesta del martes," the author withholds from the

reader the most important piece of information, in fact, the crux of

the story. We, as readers, must create the ending for ourselves, to

own our satisfaction. This same technique of withholding the crucial

ending from the reader is also used in Garcfa M^irquez's early short novel

La hojarasca ^^ This technique can take many different forms, but its ultimate consequence is always the same: it thrusts at least part of the burden of creating the story upon the shoulders of the reader,

forcing him out of his passive role into an active one.

Technique-oriented novels have their traps, and the novelists

today are aware of them. Augusto Roa Bastos, for example, warns against

the danger of falling into "mere" experimentation," or a new type of formalism, which would be self-serving and self-defeating. He adds,

however, that even such a dead-end would be preferable to a return to the old, traditional style of writing novels. Nevertheless, he is

confident that there are numerous novelists of great talent in Spanish

America today who know that technique is merely a mechanism which should be used to search for an answer to the question which is always central 108

to the novel: "What is man?" New and novel techniques should only

serve to refocus that overriding question.**^ Ernesto Scibato concurs,

stating that technique for its own sake is a sterile pursuit. Techniques are useful if they respond to the novelist's needs. For example, when the novelist "discovered" the unconscious, then the technique of the interior monologue became not only useful but practically indispensable.

But when a technical innovation is used for Its own sake alone, he says, it is a sure sign of a period of literary decadence. ^° Finally,

Vargas Llosa tells us that the only valid use of technique is to cancel the distance between the reader and the story being told— to prevent the reader from withdrawing to a distance from which he can act as judge or

witness to what is occurring in the novel . Technique must serve to thrust the reader into the midst of the novel, to absorb him into the work, so that he loses his omniscience and his detachment. ^^

We should point out in conclusion that this section on techniques does not pretend to be a compendium of all the techniques currently in use by the novelists. It is rather an investigation of those techniques discussed by today's authors in their theoretical writings. Some ^ery well-known techniques— such as stream of consciousness—are missing, perhaps because the novelists consider them too well-known and too widely employed today to be innovations.

The Blurring of Genres

The novel has always been an imprecisely defined genre, and today it is becoming increasingly so. Many of the novelists believe that literary genres are moving closer to each other and that their delimitations are becoming increasingly blurred. 109

Julio Cortlzar states very flatly that he does not believe in

the concept of genres at all. He says that it is the old fashioned

Western rationalism which has traditionally required that everything^

occupy a neatly defined, clearly assigned place. This includes

literature, which was divided into compartments called "genres."

Today's books, however, are characterized by a flexibility, an opening

in all directions, which makes the idea of genres obsolete. There are novels that are poems, poems that are novels, novels that are

collages . Cort^zar compares the novel to a large trunk, into whose ample form a multiplicity of contents can fit with complete liberty.

Cortcizar suggests that the only law which should rule the novelist

is that which will prevent the law of gravity from making the novel fall out of the reader's hands. Other than this whimsical general rule, he sees no other formal restrictions on the novel. And this, he states, is the noveT's greatest asset, because it gives the novelist the greatest possible artistic leeway, opening up -infinite creative possibilities,^^

Cabrera Infante tells us^^ he never thinks in terms of novels, stories, memoirs, essays, articles, or anything of the sort. "I never

think in terms of literary forms, I think in terms of literature I always think in terms of the blank page and the v/ords I shall write on it, one after another, and the interconnection of those words, their interplay, their replay, their play." (Here Cabrera is speaking of

literatura ludica , literature as a game.) The genre subdivisions of literature are unimportant to him— they are merely divisions which occupy the attention of "serious" scholars. Cabrera Infante does not no

refer -to his Tres tristes tigres as a novel. He always calls it by

its full title or by its initials TTT. He states that Tres tristes

tigres is hot a novel in the traditional sense, so why does it have to

have the label "novel" attached to it? He asks if Alice in Wonderland

would likewise be considered a "novel." But he recognizes that people

are likely to continue calling his book a novel, since other innovative

works such as Tristram Shandy , Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are called

novels, although they are not novels in the traditional sense. ^"^

Cabrera Infante also speaks of the close kinship between the novel,

and poetry. He says that the novel originally sprang from epic poetry,

the Iliad and the Odyssey , continuing through the medieval epics which degenerated 'into romances of chivalry, which ultimately inspired

the first truly great modern novel, Don Quixote . Cabrera continues that it is not unexpected that the first great contemporary novel,

Ulysses , also is inspired by an epic novel in verse, the Odyssey . In

Ulysses , he says, Joyce recreates the poetic, mythical quality of the

Odyssey . Ever since Joyce, "poetry and the novel have approached each

Other so closely that there are books like Nabokov's Pale Fire in which it is impossible to separate them;"^^ This view of the novel is reflected in Lezama Lima's "poetic system" to which we alluded in the previous chapter. Lezama's Paradiso is, indeed, a monumental poem which ultimately became a narrative. In such a novel, the terms "prose" and

"poetry" are practically indistinguishable.

The novel, according to Vargas Llosa, is an "imperialistic" genre, a genre which invades all the others and incorporates their elements.

The novel uses poetry, theatrical dialogue and the essay. The reverse Ill

does not occur, however, for the other genres are much more formally'

restricted in structure than the novel. Vargas Llosa' points out that

poetry's approach to knowledge is an intuitive one (as we have seen,

Ernesto SSbato also speaks of the poetic quality of the novel, meaning

its intuitive rather than its rational aspect), while the essay uses

intelligence and reason much more than intuition. The novel, however,

uses both approaches— the rational and the intuitive— to capture

reality, and in doing so, gives a wider view of reality than either

poetry or the essay. For that reason, he says that the novel is in'

fact a superior form of literature in that its scope and vision are

broadei—more total— than other genres. ^^ This idea is repeated by

SSbato, who says that the novel— an "impure" genre—must ,be a Suimia

of all the other genres, paralleling on the formal level the total-

izing ideal of the novel. ^'

Ambiguity

A remarkable trend toward ambiguity has already been noted on

several occasions in this study. The contemporary Spanish American

novel tends not so much toward clarity as toward an intentional .

obfuscation. The novelist often leads the reader into situations in which choices and directions are not clear. Sometimes the novel does

not even reach a conclusive resolution, and the reader is under-

standably perplexed.

Carlos Fuehtes says that this ambiguity is due to the changes in

Spanish American society. , In the days of Sarmiento, choices were

simpler, easier to formulate and resolve. To choose between 112

"civilization" on the one hand and "barbarism" on the other was not

difficult. Everyone knew in which direction the future lay: educate

the people and the nation will prosper and progress. In such an

atmosphere, literature reflected the clear-cut choices of society: the

characters and situations of Jos^ M^rmol's Amalia , for example, are

irrevocably good or irrevocably bad. The reader has no trouble

distinguishing the difference, and readily sides with the "good guys."^'

' But in the twentieth century, the modern world has come to Latin

America,: and with it has come the end of the oversimplification that was typical of the nineteenth century. Choices are more complex now.

Fuentes says that the first breakdown in this black-and-white polarity in Spanish American literature occurred in the novels of the Mexican

Revolution. ^^ He states that writers such as Azuela, GuzmSn and Munoz were the first to portray man's character as ambiguous, consisting of both good and evil. In the Mexican Revolution, ideological goals became entangled with personalities and charisma, and the'common man did not know where his allegiance belonged. The novel of the Mexican

Revolution embodied this. basic trait of human nature: ambivalence, vacillation, uncertainty, ambiguity.

Today, dilemmas of epic proportions confront mankind daily.

Questions of existence and faith plague him. The overwhelming complexity of life in an urbanized society, in which old values of family, community and religion can easily break down, creates a situation in which modern Latin American man does not know v/here to turnfor answers. Like his counterpart elsewhere in the modern world, he seeks simple solutions but does not know where to find them,^° 113

.Probably nowhere in the Spanish American world is this anguish and confusion more widely felt than in Argentina, where metaphysical

anguish sometimes seems to be the national pastime. Ernesto SSbato

vocalizes the feelings of one novelist facing this confusion, and tells

us why the novel is the most adequate form he has found for giving voice to the ambiguity of modern life. He recognizes that, as a human being,

he is full of contradictions and doubt, and that is why he chooses to be

a novelist rather than a philosopher or sociologist. These latter

two, he says, are obliged to put down their findings and conclusions

in coherent systems of ideas. The novelist, on the other hand, is

free to express in his fiction all those things that are eating away

at his soul, all his internal conflicts and ambiguities. The novel

can be totally chaotic and incoherent. For that reason, it gives us

a deep and truthful account of reality-- that is, the interior reality

of man's being, which is the reality that counts. SSbato says that if three or four really good novels had been written about the dictatorship of Juan Manuel Rosas, we would "know" (i.e., "feel," "understand,"

"intuit") what Rosas and his period in history were like. Instead, we understand very little of him for we have mostly dry historical data, which tell us almost nothing about the real man. ^*

The artist is the person best equipped to portray ambiguity, according to Julio CortSzar. Citing himself as an example, he says in the section of la vuelta ai dfa en ochenta mundos called j'Del sentimiento de no estar del todo" that he often has the disquieting but rather enjoyable feeling of, being not quite "with it," of being slightly off- center. This imbalance he translates into his literary works by con- 114

stantly throwing into doubt that which he just presented as fact, or '

vice-versa. In that way, he also keeps the reader off balance, wondering where truth lies, where he .can take .hold and be sure the

props will not be knocked out from under him. Thus the novelist

intentionally robs the reader of the traditional "security" he would

prefer to have, and faces him with the ambiguous situations which

reflect life's contemporary quandaries and which call for the "accomplice

reader's" decision with regard to meaning and truth. ^^

Citing Carlos Fuentes' La region mcfs transparente as a model of

the effective utilization of ambiguity in the novel, Jos6 Donoso says that Fuentes uses counterfeit or adulterated information and view-

points as well as legitimate ones, leaving the reader dazed and . perplexed, not knowing what to believe. Literature, concludes Donoso, has absolutely no obligation to explain or clarify. ^^ Which is the same thing SSbato means when he says that the purpose of literature is not to

demonstrate (demostrar) but simply to show ( mostrar )— to show society and human nature in all its profound and often unfathomable complexity, confusion and ambiguity.

It^

CortSzar-asks:

iQue es un estilo , para usar una palabra ya fuera de moda, esa manera de decic las cosas que distingue al verdader'o escritor de los demls? iLa correccidn, la claridad, la riqueza del vocabulario? Basta de bromas. Un estilo es a la vez un imSn y un espejo,.es ese milagro verbal que ni siquiera el creador puede explicar, por el cual las frases, los pertodos, los capftulos y al fin la obra entera actdan como catalizadores de profundas y 115

multiples potenci as; es ese don de decir que a- Pedro le duele la cabeza y decirlo de una manera que simultaneamente abre en el lector una cantidad de caminos que llevan mucho ni5s allci de Pedro y de la jaqueca; es esa porosidad, esa permeabilidad, esa din^mica y esa erdtica del verbo que da a Cien afios de soledad lo que ninguna Salamanca prestarTaT^'*

Style, then, is undefinable— it is a "verbal miracle" which even its own

creator cannot explain. Cortlzar backs up this notion by citing a

dictionary definition of style: ".. .(loO manera peculiar que cada cual tiene de escribir o de hablar, estb es, de expresar sus ideas y sentimientos."^^ Style is therefore an individual achievement for each person, a category in which strict norms cannot be established.

Each writer must seek his own mode of expression. Cortcizar advances the notion, however, that in any great style, the language ceases to be a mere vehicle for the expression of ideas and feelings and approaches that outer limit or state in which it becomes a part of what is expressed, a reiteration of th^ concept that "form" and "content" are inseparable.

A "bad" style, according to Cortcizar, is one produced by a writer who lacks the "ear"— an innate talent— for euphony and rhythm. Without this gift, the writer's style is likely to be pompous, rambling, overly flowery, or characterized. by any number of fatal "stylistic" flaws. He cites at random phrases chosen from different books: "...el tcicito consentimiento del ancestral y perentorio llamado >de su natural eza ind6cil y conceptiva..."; "...[su ros'tro se enciende con] el fuego indomable del sonrojo..."; "...tomcindole la cara con las dos manos. .."

(Cortcizar asks irreverently if there is someone who could take her face in his three hands). What characterizes all of these phrases is an overabundance of words, which in turn creates waste and impoverishment 116

in an author's style. To say much with few words should be the objective

of style^^ (see Chapter II on "Simplicity of Language Versus Literary

Language"). Moreover, says Cort^zar, style should be original structure moving on all planes (altitude, latitude, profundity), and should be the best way to express what the author has to say. Above all, it must

^^ not be an end in itself.

. That style is' simply the best way of expressing what an author has to say is echoed by the Chilean critic and novelist Fernando Alegrta.

He states that if a novelist finds an esthetic form which fits his own inner reality, which helps to shape and mold it into a work of art, then he has found his "style."^®

The idea of style as "ornamentation" of language is a concept flatly rejected by SIbato and Cort^zar. Style, S^ibato asserts,' is "the only v/ay in which an artist can say what he has to say. And if the result is unusual, it is not because the language is, but rather because that man's way of seeing the world is." Style, he continues, must wrap itself around the writer's vision of the world as a ballerina's tights mold themselves around the contours of her body.^^ It is worth- while to repeat SSbato's citation of Pascal's dictum which v;e cited earlier; "Cuando uno se encuentra con un estilo natural, se queda asombrado y encantado: porque esperaba hall arse con un autor y se encuentra con un honibre. "'" This is the heart of SSbato's theory of style: style must flow freely and naturally from what is expressed within that style, and simplicity and directness are the maximum virtues.

(As we saw in Chapter II, this theory conflicts with Carpentier's theory of the baroque.) SSbato cites Dante's conciseness and Stendhal 's almost 117

mathematical sobriety as two examples of authors who express their

thoughts and emotions without verbosity. /)is we saw earlier, however,

S^bato warns that a "natural " and "spontaneous" style is not to be equated with an "easy" style; writing which seems to flow freely is often the product of multiple anguished versions.'^

. That style is determined by the theme of the novel is emphasized by Garcfa Mcirquez, who cites his own personal example, saying that there

is an easily discernible metamorphosis in his style. In" El coronel no

ti ene qui en le escriba and La mala hora , his subject was specific— the

Colombian wars of la violencia— and his style was concise, sober, direct,

in the manner "of journalistic reporting. In La hojarasca and Cien anos

de soledad , his style is less direct> less concise, less dry, because he

is no longer "reporting" on a problem—^his literary vision has opened up to include imaginary and mythical levels as well as the commonplace, everyday levels of reality. The style of El coronel no tiene quien le escriba was simply inadequate to express what he had to say in Cien anos

'^ de soledad . Therefore, he changed it.

Garcta MSrquez tells how he arrived at the style he used in Cien "

anos de soledad . His problem in this novel was to tear down the in- visible barrier between what seemed real and what seemed fantastic, because in the world he was trying to capture, that barrier did not exist. The problem was to make the reader believe the story as he did.

It took twenty years and four "apprenticeship" books before he discovered the solution, which was quite simple: he had to tell the story as his grandparents would have told it. He remembers that they used to tell him stories of events that were absolutely fantastic, incredible and 118

sometimes horrifying and atrocious, but they always related these tales . in a firm, yet serene tone of voice. In short, they never doubted their own tales, and their conviction convinced the listener that it was all true. Garcfa M^rquez concluded that if he told his slightly fantastic story in the same tone of confident serenity, it would have to be equally convincing. So he set out to tell his tale in an unruffled, unperturbed style which is straightforward, direct, and which the reader finds difficult to challenge, though the story itself bends credulity tp its limit. He says that it was difficult at times to reproduce the way his grandparents talked without having it sound somewhat archaic or at least out of date. But he decided simply to tell the story the way they would have told it, without sidetracking for explanations or apologies— hoping the self-conviction of the story-teller would carry the reader along with him.'^

The "novel istic novel" ( novel a novel esca ) is the narrative form to which Ernesto SSbato believes the novel periodically returns. When the novel faces experiments such as the contemporary French nouveau roman , which is a dead-end alley, the novel must go back to its romantic sources for renewal. He reminds us that the word "romantic" comes from the

French word roman , "novel." Therefore, to say that a novel is romantic is to say that the novel is novelistic. Of course, by "romantic," he is not referring to nineteenth-century romanticism specifically, but rather to an abstraction he calls "neo-romanticism" to which the novel comes back time and again after experimental forays in other directions.

He cites as examples Stendhal and Flaubert, who were romantic writers to the core, but were repelled by the excessive sentimental ism of "pseudo- 119

romanticism" which was in vogue in the early nineteenth century.

Flaubert's Madame Bovary , a highly romantic novel, was nevertheless

written with a dryness and abruptness ( violencia ) which go against the

romantic grain. Although Scibato does not state precisely what he means

by this "neo-romanticism" to which the novel returns, it seems clear

that he is referring to a general tone of subjective inquisitiveness,

a tendency to examine man and his world from a personal viewpoint

without scientific pretensions (as in naturalism) and without the

lachrymose frivolity of some romantic literature. In general terms,

then, Scibato feels the most natural style for today's novel is a return

to "romanticism," in order to achieve the total novel of metaphysical

concern which is his ideal"* and to write with "passion" about man's

existence.

Passion would prevent over-intellectual ization, a concern unique

to Cortcizar among today's novelists. Yet, he warns against heeding

those who would demand that literature be accessible to all. He says

that while highly intellectual literature may go over some people's

heads, it may also force them to take a step outside themselves, and

may show them something new, something different.'^ CortSzar admits

that Rayuela suffers from hyperintellectuality. But he is not willing

to renounce that intellectuality, as long as he can breathe life into

it. He says that he cannot and will not forsake what he knows and

feels; what, in fact, he is, simply as a concession to prejudice. The

.problem is to give this hyperintellectuality new intentions, new targets

and points of departure. CortSzar's frontal attack on traditional language

and style is one major aspect of this intellectual side of Rayuela which a

120

we discussed in the previous chapter. CortSzar says that his literary

attacks which are directed at the very foundation of literary art-

language, style, v/ords—may seem suicidal, but he prefers being a

suicide to a zombie. Therefore, he will hold on to his "hyperintellec-

tuality," for he sees it as the possible "opening" toward his longed-for

"something new." If his intellectual style discourages or defeats

some readers, that is the price he will have to pay.'^

In conclusion, an awareness of form and a concern for style are

the common denominators which Vargas LI osa finds in all of today's major novelists. The novelists, he says, seem to recognize that their success or failure depends not on the themes of their novels so much as on vision, technique and style. No one single approach or style is to be preferred.- Each novelist develbjjs his own, the one which responds to his individua'l needs, his personality and his perspective. Within this diversity lies the esthetic independence of Spanish America— goal long sought but which only today is being realized.'' 121

i NOTES

( -^Fuentes, La nueva novel a hispanoamericana . p. 56.

^Gonzalez, "Uh pulpo en una jarra minoana," p. 15.

•^Selbato, "Por, una novel a novelesca y metaffsica," pp. 19-21.

^Fernando Alegrta, "La novela total: un diSlogb con SSbato," in

Homenaje a Ernesto Sgbato , ed. Helmy F. Giacoman (New York: Las Am(?ricas, 1973), p. 27.

^Ibid., pp. 20-21.

^We shall discuss this "difficult" aspect of the novel in more detail in Chapter IV.

'Gonzalez Bermejo, Cosas de escri tores , p. 62.

«Ibid., p. 80.

^Vargas Llosa et al ., ~~Antologfa mtnima de M. Vargas Llosa, pp. 140-143.

*°Harss, Into the Mainstream , pp. 358-359.

* 'Vargas Llosa, "The Latin American Novel Today: introduction," p. 16.

'^Mario Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marguez : Historia de un "deicidio, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Barral, 1971), p. 480).

'/Guibert, Seven Voices , pp. 293-295.

'''CortSzar, Ultimo round , p. 104, "primer piso."

. '^Harss, op. cit., pp. 242-243.

'^Julio Cortcizar, "Situacidn de la novela," Cuadernos Ameri canos. ' ~ July-August, 1950, p. 229.

^'Gonzcllez Bermejo, op. cit., pp. 86-87.

'^Guibert, op. cit., p. 415.

'^Emir Rodrtguez Monegal, "ConversaciSn con Severo Sarduy," , Revista de Occidente ^ December 1970, p. 327.

-.^''Fuentes, "Hopscotch," p. 142. ; 122

^^Garpentier, Tientos y diferenctas , pp. 40-41.

A ^^We have already examined several of these techniques in preceding sections dealing with specific aspects of the, novel. Our present section will be a more general one. Here we wish to present a broad spectrum of the technical approaches proposed by today's novelists in their attempt to create the ideal total novel.

^^Collazos et al., op, cit., pp. 39-41.

^•Mario Vargas Llosa, La novel a (Montevideo: Cuadernos de literatura, 1958), pp. 22-28. .

^'Gonzcllez Bermejo, op. cit., p. 68.

^^Ibid.y pp. 69-70.

"Ibid., p. 69.

^^SSbato, "For una novela novelesca y metaffsica," pp. 13-14.

^^Gonz^lez Bermejo, , op. cit. , p. 80. .

'"Ibid., pp. 83-84.

^'Harss, op. cit. , pp. 355-358.

'^Guibert, op. cit., p. 418. .

^^Cabrera Infante, "Las fuentes de la narracidn," p. 46.

^•Vargas Llosa, La novela , p. 7-8.

^^Guibert, op. cit., p. 136.

^^Harss, op. cit. , pp. 82-83.

^'Emir Rodriguez Monegal, "The Novel as Happening: an Interview with Jose Donoso," Review (Fall 1973), p. 38.•

^°Vargas Llosa, Garcfa Marquez : Historia de un deicidio " , pp. 399-402.

''For a discussion of the "marvelous" view of reality in the

Spanish American novel , see Chapter IV.

''"Slbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 131.

''^Harss, op. cit., pp. 240-241. —

123

'•^Ibid., p. 230. We shall return to the element of humor- in Chapter VI.

"^Cortcizar, Rayuela . pp. 452-45,4.

'^'•Ibid., pp. 497-498.

•^^itj^-d^^ pp^ 532-533.

'*^Ernesto Sabato also speaks of this idea of making the reader an accomplice of the author. A novel must have its final development and conclusion in the reader, he says. The author and the reader must collaborate in order to create the finished work. S^ibato, El escritor y sus fantasrhas , p. 197.

"'Harss, op. cit. , p. 358.

^^Vargas Llosa, Garcta ~ Mlirquez ; Historia de un "~deicidio, pp. 351-352.

•^Roa Bastos, "Imagen y perspectives de la narrativa latinoamericana actual," p. 12.

.^"Seibato, "Por una novela novelesca.y metaftsica," p. 15. ;

^^Vargas Llosa et al. , Antologfa minima de M. Vargas Llosa,— pp. 137-138. . —

^^GonzSlez Bermejo, op. cit., p. 128.

^^Guibert, op. cit., p. 408.

5'^Ibid., pp. 412-413.

"Ibid., pp. 421-422.

^^Vargas Llosa, La novela , pp. 1-2.

^'Ernesto Scibato, "l Crisis de la novela or novela de la crisis?," Eco (Bogotcl), 16 (1968), p. 630.

^^Harss, op. cit., pp. 305-306.

^^Fuentes^ La nueva novela hispanoamericana , pp. 14-15.

^oibid., pp. 26-27.

^^Sgbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 48.

^^Julio Cortazar, La. vuelta al dta en ochenta mundos (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1967), pp. 24^6"^ ~ ~ 124

*'^Jose Donoso, Hi stori a personal del "boom" (Barcelona: Anagrariia, 1972), pp. 47-48.

: ^"Collazos et al., op. cit., pp. 48-49.

^^Cortazar, La vuelta al dta en ochenta mundos , p. 94.

"Ibid., p. 95.

- ^'Ibid., pp. 98-99. I

^®Ivan A. Schulman et al. , Coloquio sobre la hovela hispano-' americana (Mexico: Tezontle, 1967), p. 139. .

^^Sgbato, El escritor y sus fahtasmas , p. 210.

'"Ibid.; p. 213.

'*Ibid. , pp. 212-213.

"Gonzalez Bermejo.op. cit., pp. 22-23.

'^Domingo, "Entrevistas: Gabriel Garcfa Ma'rquez," p. 6.

"*Sc[bato, "Por una novela novelesca y metafisica," pp. 11-12-.

'^Julio Cort^zar, "Algunos aspectos del cuento," Casa- de"'las Americas , July 1970, p. 185.

'^Harss, op. cit., pp. 244-245.

"Vargas LI osa, "The Latin American Novel Today: Introduction," p. 10. CHAPTER IV

REALITY AND THE NOVEL

The Nature of Reality in the Contemporary Novel

Why should men torture themselves, asks Mario Vargas Llosa, trying to create a fictional reality when there is so much drama and adventure in the "real" world around us. For the Peruvian novelist, the answer lies in the incompatibility which the novelist senses between himself and reality. This breach between the self and the universe makes of the novelist something of a misfit, out of step with his society and his times. There are probably as many explanations of this insatis- faction as there are novelists; in fact, most novelists would probably not know why they are rebelling against reality. If they did, they would most likely not be novelists. Vargas Llosa says:

iDe que nace esa insatisfaccidn de la cual es resultante una vocacidn literaria? Creo que en esto la respuesta varta en cada caso, que probablemente hay tantas respuestas como novel istas, pero en todo caso conviene no preguntarle. al novel ista los orfgenes, las ratces de su insatisfaccidn, 0, mejor dicho, de su vocacidn. Creo que esto tambien es irremediable, que si el novelista fuera consciente del origen de ese divorcio con el mundo, si §1 supiera exactamente c(5mo, en qu6 momento y por qud sus relaciones con la real i dad se viciaron, ya no serta novelista. Creo que la vocacidn de un novelista es justamente una voluntad prolongada en el tiempo, una interrogacidn a lo largo de una vida, sobre las rafces, los ortgenes de esa insatisfaccidn, y simultSneamente una tentativa de desalojar de sf esa insatisfaccidn, ese malestar, esa ansiedad, esa urgencia mSs bien inexplicable que es la vocacidn literaria.^

125 126

To write, then, is to search for meaning and to engage in a cathartic

individual and collective endeavor. Yet, at the same time, the novelist

is aware that he will not lose his rebellious spirit through creation.

Writing, in other words, justifies though it may not "pacify" rebelliousness.^ Literature's principal reason for being, continues

Vargas Llosa, is the result of the constant. heed to correct or cancel

"real" reality. The writer's hope is that he will negate the reality of the material world and replace it with another.^

Vargas Llosa's theory of the novelist's compulsion to write is echoed by Ernesto SSbato. Scibato says that he feels a great discontentment in the face of Latin American reality today. He believes that

important literature is rather like the reverse side of the daily world,

like dreams, in that the creative act is an attempt to create an alternate reality— a desire generated by the writer's discontentment

toward the real world surrounding him. As the inspiration for the novelistic reality in his books, Scibato says that the author must accept all possible views of real life as reality. He says that the "gray apartment of a gray professor who lives on Charcas street" is just as much a part of reality as the more "picturesque," more ''novelistic" life of the "tenement slums of San Telmo." Both must be treated as integral parts of Argentine reality."* ...

This idea of the novel as a subjective recreation of reality is central to most of the contemporary Spanish American novelists' theories of the novel. Today's novel does not attempt to mirror reality in the manner of the traditional novel; it rather rejects, attacks or reshapes

the universe. Thus, Carlos Fuentes sees Cieri anos de soledad as the 127

supreme Spanish American recreation of reality: through the inter- mediationof the writer's imagination, Garcta Mcirquez has constructed a totally fictional world, a world which does not need real reality to justify itself, but which (because it is so self-sustaining and autonomous) attacks and refashions the reality from which it was abstracted. Garcta Mcirquez creates a place, Macondo, which is all places, and a time which is all times.

Imagination is the magic key to this liberation from "real reality," and almost without exception, today's writers proclaim the novelist's right to make full use of his imagination. Fuentes, in commenting on

Cortcizar's Rayuela , points out that Cort^zar fills his artistic reality with accident, comedy, error, banality, in short, the fruits of his active imagination. "Somos como yo quiero verlos," Fuentes says, "no como ustedes quieren ser vistos."^ In other words, the relation between real reality and novel i Stic reality becomes rather tenuous at best. Almost no novelist today advocates that literature should represent or reproduce reality. Freedom, imagination and creativity are the order of the day.

It is useful at this point to recall that Vargas Llosa holds that reality cannot be bodily transplanted into literature but must be trans- posed: "That's one of the problems of realism. I don't think realism in literature can ever be a direct enunciation of reality. Litiarature is always a transposition of reality. The segment of life chosen by the author must be transformed, manipulated, compiled in a very special way to prevent it from being frozen, bled on its way into literature."^ 123

This is an important point which is echoed by many of Vargas

Llosa's contemporaries.. Carlos Fuentes, for example, referring to

his novel Cambio de piel , tells us that the only way to understand

this novel is to accept the fact that it is absolute fiction. It

never aspires to be a reflection of reality. Gone is the nineteenth-

century ideal of the "mirror-novel." In Fuentes* view, the act of

writing itself is an act of transposition, therefore, a subjective

distortion of the reality being dealt with. A literary work grants

a new form to a given "reality." Fuentes tells how his father read

Cambio - de piel, and, upon finishing it, threw it down in disgust, /

exclaiming "Entonces resulta que nada era cierto. " The reader,

Fuentes concludes, always prefers to think that what the author is

telling him is all true, that it faithfully reproduces reality.' But

that assumption is no longer valid, for, as in Cambio de piel . it

often turns out that "none of it was true."' Today's novel, then,

is basically unreal in the traditional sense.

To move in the opposite direction and permit "real reality" to

intrude too strongly in the novel can have negative results, as Vargas

Llosa points out. He says that la violencia in Colombia contained all

the ingredients necessary for a series of truly great novels, yet the actual production was sparse and generally of poor quality. He attributes this to the fact that the novelists of the period approached la v iolencia head-on, describing in great detail the decapitations, the throat- slittings, the castrations, the rapes, in brief, the visible signs of the political turmoil. What the novelists failed to see was that the profound impact of the novel lay not in a naturalistic catalogue 129

of the atrocities of the fighting, but rather in the living who were undergoing mental anguish in their hiding places. The Impact of the horror .on the living should have been the novelists' subject, for that would be a subject which would have allowed the novelists' imagination to enter into the creation of characters and situations, which the bare recounting of atrocities ruled out.®

The idea that the "new novel" is necessary today because today's

Latin American society is new is reiterated by Carlos Fuentes. The old society, with its myths of Latin America as the Arcadia of spirituality and good taste (as exemplified in Jos6 Enrique Rodd's famous essay Ariel ), has given way to the new, consumer society of neon lights. Sears and Roebuck, washing machines, James Bond pictures

and Campbell soup cans. (In his study Tiempo mexicano , Fuentes refers to this abrupt change in direction in Latin American society as a change of gods— from Quetzal c6atl to Pepsicdatl!) This is part of the price today's Latin American must pay for being the "contemporary of all men." And this reality must take its proper place in contemporary literature. The themes considered to be "literary" and in

"good taste" are no longer valid in this new universe any more than the"! iterary" language in which former novels were written. Reality, therefore, is a wide-open concept, and each writer must be free to choose his own and deal with it as he sees fit.^

The new reality is not merely different, but operates on more

than one level. Cortoizar says that he, as well as Oliveira in Rayuela , has what could be called a "marvelous" view of reality— "marvelous" in the sense that he believes that ordinary, everyday reality cpnceals 130

a second level of reality less mysterious than human. The problem is that it is hidden by the more easily apprehended surface reality.

Cortazar, through Oliveira, seeks to force this hidden substratum into the open. '" Garcia MIrquez would agree. In response to a question, concerning what for him would constitute the ideal novel, he replies that it should be an absolutely free book which not only would be disturbing because of its political and social content, but also because of its power of penetration into reality— and best of all, if it were capable of turning reality over and showing us its "other"

side.^^ .

It is this other side, the hidden face of reality, which intrigues so many of our novelists today. We have already seen how Garcia Mcirquez uses hyperbole in his short story "Los funeral es de la MamS Grande" to evoke a second level of reality— the popular, imaginative, highly exaggerated version of Big Mama's funeral. He uses the same technique to introduce mythical, imaginative, exaggerated elements. In connection with Cien anos de soledad he says:

Lo unico que se sin ninguna duda es que la realidad no termina en el precio de los tomates. La vida cotidiana, especialmente en America Latina, se encarga de demostrarlo. El norteamericano F. W. Up de Graff, que hizo un fabuloso viaje por el mundo amazdnico en 1894, vio, entre muchas otras cosas, un arroyo de agua hirviendo, un lugar hasta donde la voz humana provocaba aguaceros torrenciales, una anaconda de .20 metros completamente cubierta de mariposas. Antonio Pigafetta', que acompano a Magal lanes en la primera vuelta mundo, al vio plantas y animales y huellas de seres , humanos inconcebibles, de los cuales no se ha vuelto a tener noticia. En Gomodoro Rivadavia, que es un lugar desolado al sur de la Argentina, el viento polar se llevd un circo entero por los aires y al dfa siguiente las redes de los Pescadores no sacaron petes del mar, sino cadSveres de leones, jirafas y el efantes. Hace unos meses, un electricista llamd a mi casa a las ocho de la manana y 131

tan pronto como le abrierondijo: "Hay que cambiar el cord6n de la plancha." Inmediatamente comprendid que se habfa equivocado de puerta, p.idid excusas y se fue. Horas

despues, mi mujer conect6 la plancha y el corddn se ;

incendid. No hay para qu§ seguir. • Basta con leer los peri6dicos, abrir bien los ojos, para sentirse dispuesto a gritar con los uriiversitarios franceses: "El poder para "^^ la imaginacidn.

Daily life is filled with events which are impossible to explain ration- ally. That is why the novelist proclaims the right to exploit vivid imagination: it is his key to the "marvelous" level of reality, such as the electrician's uncanny mistake, which exists side by side with the more obvious surface reality.

Sdbato's theoretical statements refine the interplay of human rationality and irrationality. The Age of Reason, he says, made the irrational side of man unacceptable. Reason had to be the basis of all human activity. The novelist, however, has the power and the duty to return to man the irrational, instinctual side of his character, which has been there all along, but has been suppressed by. the emphasis on rationalism. Scientific truth, says SSbato, will always find that two plus two equals four. But human truth will sometimes find that it equals five, for the irrational world of dreams, myth, imagination and fantasy obey no scientific or mathematical principles. Scibato believes that the novelist's duty is to synthesize these two faces of man, thus creating a dual view of reality. That is how man perceives (or should perceive) reality.^^

Cortcizar says that those who distinguish between "realistic"

literature and "fantastic" literature (e.g., in his Bestiario ) are dealing with a false problem. For Cortcizar, the "fantastic" view arises out of the surrealistic philosophy which, as we saw when we 132

discussed Asturias, advocated a wide lens view of reality from a variety of perspectives. Eruptions of fantasy into everyday reality are not

"exceptional"— they are instead quite normal, and that is the view

CortSzar has sought to convey in his so-called "fantastic" writings,*"*

Vargas Llosa agrees, stating that the contemporary novel has merely expanded its focus to include levels of reality and human experience which have always existed but were traditionally excluded from literature: imagination, dreams, fantasy— surrealist reality. This new fusion of objectivity and fantasy is in no way an attempt to destroy objective reality, nor is it a route for mental escape. It is rather a wider, more complete way of approaching total reality (i.e., through the total novel), and thereby, facing up to reality more fully.'^

According to Carlos Fuentes, the novelist's powers of imagination are the key to destroying the old literary hang-up of "regional" versus

"universal" literature. He asserts that the theme and the location are not what make for good (that is, universally understandable) literature, but rather the way in which the author uses his powers of creativity and imagination to make the theme and locale of his works live for the reader. A first-class story, Fuentes says, can take place in Borges'

Babel or in Rulfo's Comala. The author, not the locale, is the key to the work's success.*^ This is not easy, he continues, in view of traditional Spanish American fiction. As we saw in Chapter I, Spanish

America's history has sometimes been more imaginative than its narrative. Fuentes wonders how a writer could compete with the overwhelming beauty and size of the mountains, rivers, jungles and deserts of Latin

America; how a writer could dare to invent characters more fabulous than 133

Cortes and Pizarro, more sinister than Santa Anna or Juan Manuel Rosas,

or more tragicomical than Trujillo and Batista. Faced with such over-

whelming "fantastic" reality, the Spanish American writer tended to

retreat into a form of writing similar to the crdnica, not up 'to the

challenge of pitting his imagination against Latin America's fabulous

history and geography. Today's; novelist must reassert his right to

imagine, to reinvent history, to remove it from its epic frame and

transform it into personality, humor, language and myth, to introduce

accident, variety and impurity. '' At this juncture, Fuentes returns

again to the already examined concept of imagination and states that the

writer's imagination is the key. The time has come when the Spanish

American novel faces a new dilemma; it is no longer Sarmiento's

"civilization versus barbarism," but "imagination or barbarism. "*^

Probably the most significant embodiment of the. contemporary authors' concept of imagination is "magic realism" ( el realismo magi CO or l£ real maravilloso ). We saw previously that magic realism was inspired by French surrealism, which advocated erasing the boundary

line between daily reality and dreams. The best definition of magic realism is given by Alejo Carpentier. He states: "...lo maravilloso comienza a serlo de manera inequfvoca cuando surge de una inesperada alteracidn de la realidad (el milagro), de una revelacidn privilegiada de la realidad, de una iluminacidn inhabitual or singularmente favorecedora de las inadvertidas riquezas de la realidad, de una ampliacidn de las escalas y categorfas de la realidad, percibidas con particular intensidad en virtud de una exaltacidn del espfritu que lo conduce a un modo de 'estado Ifmite'."*^ To begin with. 134

Carpentier goes on, the marvelous view of reality presupposes faith.

Those who do not believe in saints cannot be cured by a saint's

miracles. Carpentier cites as a literary example the convincing tone

of Rutilio in Cervantes' Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda when

Rutilio speaks of men who have been turned into wolves. Rutilio is

convincing, says Fuentes, because in Cervantes' time, people commonly

believed in la mania lupina and' its effect upon humans. Without

faith, the "marvelous" becomes just an unconvincing literary trick,

as was the case with many surrealistic writers who tried unsuccessfully

to invoke primitive peoples' belief in the marvelous. Carpentier says

that magic realism "came home" to him when he visited Haiti. There

he found magic realism coexisting with real reality on an everyday

basis. Thousands of men, Ipnging for freedom, actively believed in

the magical powers of Mackandal, to the point where their collective

faith produced a miracle on the day of his execution. But Carpentier

believes that magic realism is an integral part of the reality not only of Haiti but of all Latin America. He cites Latin America's history:

the search for the fountain of eternal youth and the golden cities of

Manoa and El Dorado, among other Quixotic adventures. America is far from exhausting its supply of popular myths, he says. In fact, he concludes, all of Spanish American history "is little more than a giant

chronicle of lo real maravilloso .

For Gabriel Garcta MSrquez, magic realism is not only the occurrence of the unexpected, as in Carpentier 's definition, but also the mysterious, the enigmatic within an otherwise clear and straightforward context. He states that for him, rnystery is what gives literature its value. He 135

finds magic in coimionplace events, just as Carpentier does, and seeks

^° to embody this magic—which he calls the "lost chord"— in his works.

This concept is in keeping with Garcfa Marquez's (and most of his con-

temporaries') view of a total reality, going/beyond surface phenomena

perceived by the five senses, to a second level of reality, composed

of dreams, intuitions and imagination. As to the objective of magic

realism, Garcfa Mcirquez notes: "Yo creo que particularmente en Cien

afios de soledad yo soy un escritor espantosamente realista, porque

creo que en America Latina todo es posible, todo es real...; Yo

creo que tenemos que trabajar en investigaciones del lenguaje y de

formas t^cnicas del relato, a fin de que toda esta fant^stica

realidad latinoamericana forme parte da nuestros libros y que la

literatura latinoamericana corresponda a la vida latinoamericana donde

suceden las cosas mas extraordinarias todos los dfas como los que

hicieron treinticuatro guerras civiles y las perdieron todas...".^^

The Novelist as Witness to His Society

/\n important question in the contemporary novel of Spanish America

is whether or not the novelist is or should be a witness to his society— whether or not his works should reflect the specific problems of Spanish

American society. This question receives an almost unanimously affirm- ative answer from the contemporary writers, although when they say

"witness to society," they mean something quite different from what was understood by nineteenth-century realists.

Ernesto SSbato says that the novelist's principal role is to be a witness of his society. ^^ The novelist's testimony is more complete 136

than that of a philosopher, for example, because the novel's hybrid nature (a cross between fiction and reality), its contradictory ambiguity, enable it to present a more complete picture of reality-

its society— than any other art form. Scibato quotes Nadeau who said great novels are those which transform the writer (as he writes) and the reader (as he reads). This should be the goal of literature.

The concept of giving pleasure to the reader, says S^bato, has nothing to do with literature. The novelist applies a huge magnifying glass to mankind, looking into the innermost recesses of his being. Today's novelist is less an inventor than ah explorer or discoverer.^' He leaves behind the old-fashioned exoticism of themes and locales in order to turn his vision to his own countrymen, to the men of his own city, his own street or neighborhood, in order to see what they are like inside. Scibato warns against taking social or political elements as themes— the theme of the novel must always be man, he insists. But to write sensitively, probingly, deeply about man, will inevitably be the artist's most valid way of giving a profound testimony of man and the world in which he lives. Since man is a political, economic, social and metaphysical animal, any novel which investigates man in depth will necessarily reflect all these different elements of his diverse livelihood.^'* This, in fact, is the ultimate test of great literature, according to Scibato: the in-depth, even ferocious, investigation of the human condition. ^^ Any novel that actively delves into the human condition will automatically provide a truer reflection of .its society than a novel that consciously sets out only to reflect that society. SSbato sounds a note that will be echoed in Corteizar, 137

Vargas Llosa, and others: all true literature that undertakes this

" in-depth look- at man and his society will in some way be a merciless

attack on that society, because it is an attack by the artist on his

own soul and on those he knows best. This point of view inevitably

opens the v/riter to charges of beiag unpatriotic. S^bato affirms that

indeed it is a deep and abiding love of his nation and fellow man which leads the novelist to tear so deeply into their souls, hoping.,

ultimately, to make them better. ^^

The novelist as a witness to his society is a position also

supported by Julio Cortcizar. CortSzar emphasizes that he would never demand that a writeract asa tribune of society, as an agitator, activist or champion of causes. But he does demand that the v;riter be a witness to his times in his personal way as were Ezequiel

Martfnez Estrada, the Argentine essayist, and Camus, the French writer.^' The novel, Cort^zar continues, through its multifaceted hybrid openness and totality, presents us with characters who act as witnesses and -arise to testify for or against us (the readers). But

In either case, they help us to understand more clearly the exact nature of the human situation of our time. ^®

The contemporary. novelist does not write with the hope of achieving prestige, riches or popularity, but for the" purpose of capturing reality and expressing it in esthetic forms, states the Mexican novelist Rosario Caste! lanos. He or she writes with the moral imperative of denouncing what is wrong in society (a statement with which, most of her contemporaries across Spanish America would disagree). And also, he writes in order to survive on the page, surrounded by all that 138

he loved, all that has been intolerable and painful, everything that has angered or soothed him. Rosario Castellanos concludes that, as

Larra said a century before, to write in countries like those of •

Spanish America is to weep.^^

The novel 's supreme purpose, according to Miguel Angel Asturias, is to "contar lo nuestro"— to tell the Spanish American story. We have spent our lives hearing the Europeans tell their tales, and now that the

European novel is in a state of decline, it is Spanish America's turn.^"

This idea is repeated by Vargas Llosa, but as usual, he finds a rather. unique way to state his case. He gives us the image of the novelist as a vulture, feeding upon the carrion, of a decadent society. He explains his theory as follows:

This tendency may be defined by asserting that the most propitious moment for the development of prose ' fiction is when reality ceases to have precise meaning for a historic community because the society's religious, moral, or political values, which once provided the foundation for social life and the master key for per-

. ceiving reality, have entered upon a period of crisis and no longer enjoy the faithful support of the collectivity. As a result, great novels normally do not appear in times of revolutionary fervor when the entire society is united behind one great cause. Not a single outstanding novel was written during the French Revolution, or during the Russian revolution, or during the wars for independence in either North or South America, or during the Chinese revolution. Great novels never appear in these moments of optimistic exultation, of hope and faith in a country's destiny; rather they appear in the preceding period when the erosion of the old order permits the community to pierceive only confusion and chaos in the reality that surrounds them. This crisis of faith that accompanies the decay of historic reality, this skepticism toward the guiding values of the world, which is the most overt symptom of the decomposition of a society, curiously enough awakens an increasing receptivity, an appetite, an intense need for fiction, for narrative images that are capable of creating a new reality inherently different from the one in which 139

it is no longer possible to believe...:. This is the phenomenon that is currently taking place, in Latin America. The Latin American countries today are experiencing the most disturbing crisis in their history. All agree that one period is closing and that another, for better or worse, will soon open up; but no one has the courage to face up to the reality of today. Never- theless, the narra'tive images inspired by this offensive reality which all despise have been received with greedy enthusiasm, with unprecedented credulity.^*

Vargas Llosa goes on to cite the decadent societies, on the verge of dramatic or even violent change, which produced such literary out- bursts as the chivalric novel, the French "romans maudits," the great

Russian novels of Tolstoi and Dostoyevski. It is such societies, he contends, that breed in their artists a total rejection of society and lead them to totally recreate reality in their novels, as we saw in our section on the "total novel." Stable societies do not produce this total rejection on the part of the writer; societies in decomposition do.^^

From this concept of the nove.list as a vulture, Vargas Llosa goes on to express his idea of literature as a form of permanent insurrection against the artist's society. The writer in all societies, he states, is like a wasp buzzing around the ears of the gigantic elephant (the writer's society), repeatedly stinging the elephant with his sharp-pointed literary barbs. This is a positive service to the elephant, furthermore, in that it contributes to the never-ending process of human betterment, helping to prevent "spiritual recession," self-satisfaction, paralysis, and intellectual or moral softening.

The writer's mission is to agitate and alarm, to keep" men constantly dissatisfied with themselves and their society, just as the novelist 140

IS dissatisfied.^^ Societies inevitably attempt to "domesticate"

literature, to integrate it into the fabric of that particular society.

The Inquisition is a notorious example; The artist has the duty to fight endlessly against such domestication, even if that society

happens to be one with which he finds himself in accord.^"* The great service that the novel renders society, Vargas Llosa says, is that it forces man to take stock of himself, of both his greatness and his limitations and failings. In this way, the "novel serves to better its society. ^^

Vargas Llosa also sees the novelist as the constant "party-

pooper" ( aguafiestas ) of His society. He states that Spanish America today offers the novelist a veritable banquet of targets for his criticism. In Spanish America, injustice is the law, ignorance is rampant, exploitation, inequalities, misery, and economic, cultural and moral alienation are the order of the day. The "eternal malcontent" could hardly ask for more. But even if the socialist Utopian society dreamed of by many (Vargas Llosa and numerous other contemporary, novelists among them) should some day become a reality in Latin America, the novelist's role as malcontent would not cease. He would be compelled to continue being the party-pooper, even if it meant waging thirty- two

civil wars and losing them all , as did Colonel Aureliano Buendfa.'®

The fact that today's novel proposes as its purpose a deep and probing study of contemporary man is likely to lead to scandal, for man is so immersed in the environment that surrounds him that a sincere view of that environment is likely to produce shock. This was precisely the effect of Vargas Llosa's La ciudad y los perros. Literature, he concludes, is intrinsically scandalous. ^^ 141

A variation on the theory of the novelist as witness to his society which we have just examined is presented by Cabrera Infante. •

Cabrera Infante views himself as a literary ecologist. We saw in our

chapter on language how Cabrera sought to capture, in Tres tristes tigres , a "gallery of voices" of a loquacious Cuban society which is, in his view, disappearing. In that respect, he feels the responsibility to conserve as much of that society as he can in literary form. ^^ But when asked by an interviewer if he believes the writer's mission is to describe the world in which he lives, Cabrera Infante answers that writers are not missionaries and that they have no such "duty." His only obligation is to write as well as he can, to carry his. own possibilities as a

^^ writer as far as they will go.

We may conclude this section on the nature of reality in the contemporary novel by citing Oscar Collazos, and Julio Cortofzar's rebuttal.

Collazos states that the permanent value of the contemporary Spanish

American novel and its immense popularity—the so-called "boom" of the novel— is due chiefly to the fact that readers recognize their environment, their reality, in the novels they are reading today.'*"

Cortcizar agrees, but interprets reality differently. By reality, we must understand a far broader concept than the socio-historical and political contexts of Latin America—we must understand the multidimensional reality we examined earlier in this section, the total concept of reality, which "exalts. Incites, changes, justifies, un- hinges man, makes him more real, more a man."**^ 142

Comrnitment

The problem of a writer's commitment ( compromiso ) is an important

one among the contemporary novelists. Is the writer the spokesman for

his nation or the continent, or is he an individual revealing what

he carries within himself? Should he commit, himself in his novels

to a particular political, social, moral or' religious viewpoint?

Should he be a crusader for social reform?

Carlos Fuentes believes that the writer's social conscience was

born out of his traditional position in Spanish American society: a

member of the elite. If not an equal of the elite in financial assets,

he at least enjoyed the prestige of being a man of letters, and that

won him entry into the upper echelons of society. The writer's reaction

was a mixture of gratitude and shame, a feeling that somehow he had to

pay the people a debt for his lofty social position. Also there was

the element of frustration which arose from the fact that the writer

-sensed that he was addressing himself from the liberal wing of the

elite to the conservative wing of the elite, which either merely

tolerated his attacks on the "system" or received them with absolute

Indifference. This combination of factors often led the traditional writer to political and social militancy, and such militancy often showed

in his writings.**^

Perhaps the best example of this old-style commitment among today's

novelists in Spanish America is Asturias. He strongly advocates committed literature, a literature he regards as "...responsive to the needs of a nation, which acts as the voice of that people... ."'*' His

"banana trilogy" is a particularly appropriate illustration of his 143

belief that literature should be at the service of needed social and

political changes, attacking oppression, tyranny, suffering, poverty,

hunger and social injustices. He declares that the foreign audience

is chiefly interested in this aspect of the Spanish American continent, and that in this way, the novelist can help to publicize, and thereby

hopefully remedy, that which is wrong. It is foolish to assume, he continues, that Latin Americans can teach Europeans to reflect, to philosophize, to write egocentric or psychological novels, or to think that Latin America can produce a Proust or a Goethe. The Latin American writer has a task at hand— to better his society— and his literary works must respond to that incentive.'*'* (Some of these ideas would doubtlessly

infuriate most of today's writers.) Rita Guibert, in an interview with

Asturias, asked him to respond to a statement made by Garcfa Mcirquez that the committed novel condemns the reader to a partial view of the world and life, that Latin American readers do not want or need to have

their own drama of oppression and injustice told over and over , again in novels because they have enough evidence of it in their daily life, and what they expect of a novel is originality. Asturias responds vehe- mently:

I think Garcfa MSrquez's statement is really a disguised formula designed to prevent our novels from dealing with our own problems. This declaration of Garcia MSrquez makes me indignant, because it is inviting our future writers to conceal our tragedy. If it is true that we are describing our own drama and pain and that Latin America is already tired of hearing about it, let her. go on listening all the same, because as long as we listen it may be remedied, but it will never be remedied if, as he suggests, we'hide our tragedies and take subjects to write about from what is not ours and does not concern us, and try to create beautiful literature by dishing up plots that are alien to us and are taken directly from 144

European books.. .. We do not create literature in order to amuse and entertain people, but as part of the struggle for an America which has a right to its proper place among the nations."*^

This attitude led Asturias to create his often-criticized "protest literature." He responds to charges of literary deficiency in such works as Viento fuerte by saying: "I think it's difficult for this type of literature to be purely literary, to be concerned merely with what is beautiful or pleasing to the eyes or ears.""^

In the matter of commitment, Asturias is clearly out of step with most of today's novelists. The majority warns against the perils of committed writing such as. Asturias- advocates but does not uniformly follow. Alejo Carpentier, for example, notes that in today's world, no author can be truly neutral on questions of social and political concerns, and that silence on such matters is in itself a form of commitment.**' But with that caveat in mind, he states that, as powerful and ever-present as these concerns may be, they must never be allowed to dominate a novel and turn it into a pulpit. Social and political content has its place in the novel alongside all the other components of reality. But social content must not be allowed to degenerate into social denunciation which is better expressed in an essay or in a documented sociological study. '*®

Delving into the "here and now"— that which is closest to us and therefore best known— is the method advocated by Ernesto SSbato. for achieving a universal view of mankind. The writer's task is to find the eternal values which are reflected in the social and political drama of his own particular time and place. To live is to be in the world. 145

in a given set of circumstances that we cannot and should not try to elude.''^ But the artist's commitment should be to the human condition and not to a particular political party or point of view or as a crusading social reformer. His only duty is to delve into the essence of man and to be a witness to his era, as Shakespeare and Dante were, without becoming a social reformer.^"

The distinction between "pure, art" and "committed art" is another of the false dilemmas under which Spanish American literature has labored for too long, Carlos Fuentes warns. A personal, individual viewpoint in the novel will always offer the best and truest collective, vision of a society. It is the novelist's duty to do so in literature, for what he feels he can accomplish in the political or social arena he should do as a citizen of his society, not as a writer. In a society such as Latin America; the writer cannot be alien to the needs of his society. Furthermore, he should be a spokesman for the masses who cannot make themselves heard. But the artist must never forget that he speaks for culture and literature in general, and he should operate on a higher level than that of social protest. ^V Fuentes contradicts himself, however, by saying that a writer's actions are in his words.

What a writer can do in action in society (he cites Andr^ Malraux's participation in the Spanish Civil War) is extremely limited, and generally a futile effort. What he can accomplish through his books, however, is tremendous— he reminds us that Hitler not only burned Jews, but also books, attempting to kill the ideas and opinions contained therein. ^^ Fuentes himself keeps a safe distance from committing himself 146

to any particular literary or ideological point of view— he prefers to keep, his options open, calling his position "a rejection of every

ideological a priori, an interest in the tiers monde, freedom of judgment with regard to the United States as well as the Soviet

Union.""

Traditionally, the Spanish American writer has had to be a crusading journalist as well as a writer, as v/e have seen in an earlier chapter. Mario Vargas Llosa reiterates this idea, adding that although the situation is much changed today, the novel- still tends toward the journalistic approach in many cases. The obvious danger in this approach is that such literature runs the risk of becoming propaganda and of losing its artistic, creative content. That is the case with the bulk of traditional Spanish American novels.^** An interviewer asked

Vargas Llosa if it was possible for a man to be committed to a particular

'social system as a citizen, but deny it as a writer. Vargas Llosa answered yes, saying that a cormiitment to a social system affects only certain planes of reality (political, economic), while a novel seeks to represent simultaneously many more levels of reality, and the author's

rebellion does not necessarily have to take place on the political and

social or economic planes. ^^. And even on those levels, Vargas Llosa

says that a writer has the duty to be continually aware and to assume

his role of gadfly, even in a society with which he -finds himself

generally in accord.

A different view of the problem is presented by Jos§ Donoso. He

says that he has found that literature formulated merely as a "problem

to solve!' with no further dimensions tends to be dry and uninteresting. 147

because it tends to omit the metaphor, which is the essence of litera-

ture.^^

Attacked by Asturias for his lack of commitment to social better-

ment, Garcia Marquez states that in his view, the artist's function in

any society is to write good novels.: He realizes, nevertheless, that

all good novels are nonconforming by nature and will therefore, be

naturally subversive to a certain extent, particularly in a continent

so in need of reform as Latin America. ^' But to write social novels

which no one will read would be a waste of time and talent. The author's

coninitment should be to write and write well, to write novels which will

disturb the reader through their power of penetration into the multiple

levels of reality.^^ As for his personal life, he does not commit

himself- Hesays: "Yo no participo ya en ningdn acto pCiblico, para

evitar confusiones. Quien tenga curiosidad. por saber lo que pienso,

que lea mis libros."^^

A distinction is made between personal and intellectual commitment

to the ideals of socialism and artistic conmitment to oneself by Julio

Cortlzar. In the latter area, Cortlzar maintains that he is and always will be a cronopio (a creative, free spirit) who writes for his own

^personal enjoyment or suffering, without any pragmatic obligations to

Latin America or to socialism. He will never write for anyone or any

particular point of view.^" Politics, he states, can easily come into

play in a novel. It is just as valid a component of man's reality as

love or nature, Viewed in this manner, politics can play an important role in the novel and can even make an impressive impact on the reader.

But politics must arise naturally from the narration. If it is artifi- 148

cially imposed from the outside— if the novelist sets out to write a

"political" novel— the work loses its literary value and becomes mere food for moths in libraries."' CortSzar admits that his personal views tend evidently to the left, toward socialism, but he will never discuss this in his literature, for only weak authors insist on emphasizing their personal commitment in their works. "^ Cortofzar and others have been accused of literary escapism by the Colombian critic Oscar Collazos for not writing explicitly about their commitment (specifically, their ideological commitment to the Cuban Revolution). CortSzar replies that, while there are writers in Latin America who are escapists, this is no reason to confuse escapist literature with CortSzar's writing. He states that although he has a clear consciousness of the socio-cultural and politicaT contexts of contemporary society, his writing originates at various levels of creation in which the imaginary, the mythical and the metaphysical join together to form a literature which is no less

responsible , although it does not preach a social or political sermon.

The author's responsibility is what counts in such a situation. Critics and readers can rather easily distinguish the responsible and creative writer from the mere escapist.^?

Cortcfzar warns graphically against the dangers of allowing one's literature to become committed to political viewpoints. In a one-page

chapter of Ultimo round , accompanied by an enlarged photograph of an ;

American dollar bill, he reprints the following statistic: "En el ano

1959, los Estados Unidos obtuvieron en Anigrica Latina 775 millones de d61ares,de beneficios por concepto de inversiones privadasj de los cuales reinvirtieron 200 y guardaron 575. (De un acta oficial de la 149

INCTAP, Conferencia de Nueva Delhi, 1968.)" This paragraph is followed

by Cortcizar's caveat: "SIN EMBARGO / el escritor Tatinoamericano/ debe

escribirtan s61o / lo que su vocacidn le dicte / sin entrar en

cuestiones / que son de la exclusiva competencia / de los economistas."^'*

Cortazar goes on to say that any writer of socialist inclinations will

be constantly urged to participate in the furthering of the cause of

socialism, first through his books, later through speeches, lectures,

signatures, open letters, debates, attendance at congresses and con-

ventions, and in politics itself. It is tip to the writer himself to see

that this does not occur, for that would tie him down and destroy the

delicate balance which permits'him to write literature with "air under

its wings," a literature which is free and can soar. He concludes:

"Amarga y necesaria moraleja: No te dejes comprar, pibe, pero tampoco "^^ vender.

Historically, many great writers have revealed a wide ideological

gulf between their personal convictions and what is expressed in their

works, as Vargas Llosa points out. ' He cites Balzac, who was an absolute

monarchist and anti-Semitic in his personal beliefs, but whose works

reflect a progressive social and political conscience. Vargas Llosa attributes such cases to the fact that the novelist is no more

responsible for the themes he writes about than the dreamer for his dreams. Both simply arise out of one's subconscious mind and take

possession of the writer or dreamer. When he is writing, the writer .

is not necessarily the same person as when he is not writing, and there is no reason why his works of fiction should reflect his personal convictions. 150

This brings up the question of the writer's role in socialist

CQuhtries. Since most of today's writers espouse "leftist" ideas and tend to be friends of the Cuban Revolution, the question arises whether or not the writer within a socialist society should openly criticize that society, particularly if it is in its formative stages and, as such, in need of reinforcement. This is the crux of the debate between

CortSzar and Collazos, the latter maintaining the author's duty to commit himself to the cause of socialism. , Cortcizar replies that the creator, from the moment in which he commits himself personally to socialism, should support the system, but in a discriminating manner.

He maintains the right to criticize if and when he chooses, and from this attitude there arises the possibility of friction between the writer and his socialist society^* (as in the cases of Herberto Padilla in Cuba and Alexander Solzhenitzyn in Russia). This position is echoed by other contemporary novelists; fundamentally, the writer holds on to his elite stance, his detachment from the rest of his society. He claims the right, even in a socialist society, to be, as Vargas Llosa says, the eternal malcontent. This leads to a related theoretical position which CortSzar states as follows: "Yo creo, y lo digo despu^s de haber pesado largamente todos los elementos que entran en juego, que escribir para una revolucidn, que escribir dentro de una revolucifin, que escribir revolucionariamente, no significa, como creen muchos, escribir obligadamente acerca de la revolucidn misma."^' The true "revolutionary" novel is not one which takes the (Cuban) Revolution as its theme, but rather the novel that seeks to revolutionize the novel form itself, as

does Rayuela . Thus, the author would be achieving on the literary 151

level the same restructuring that the revolutionaries are accomplishing on the political level— finding hew forms and structures which are more

®^ .capable of expressing man's needs and aspirations today.

In conclusion, today's Spanish American novelist is torn between the tendency toward "pure" literature and his personal feelings of guilt, rage. and shame in the face of social injustice. Cortcizar comes to a sort of synthesis of these two seemingly antithetical positions. Having restated his opposition to writing openly' "committed" literature and to turning away from literature toward politics, he says: "En lo-mSs gratuito que pueda yo escribir asomarci siempre una voluntad de contacto con el presente hist6rico'del hombre, una participacidn en su larga marcha hacia lo mejor de st mismo como colectividad y humanidad. Estoy convencido de que s61o la obra de aquellos intelectuales que respondan a esa pulsi6n y a esa rebeldfa se encarnarS en las conciencias de los pueblos y justificarS con su accifin presenjte y futura este oficio de escribir para el que hemos nacido."^'

The Social Novel; the Psychological Novel

Ernesto SSbato notes that he has been attacked on occasion by leftist critics because his novels tend toward psychological rather than social analysis. This raises the traditional dichotomy between social and psychological literature and the polemic concerning which Is more Important. SSbato affirms that the problem is an artificial one, for Individuals do not exist in isolation. Man lives surrounded by a society, and not only are his conscious actions and words the consequences of his continuous Intercourse with that society, but so are his 152

dreams and nightmares. For thi.s reason, all novels are social, even those which consciously set out to give us a "psychological" portrait of a man. In examining man, they give us a vision of the world in which he lives.. What some critics call the "social novel" is an external, superficial manifestation. S^bato says that if there were "social" writers in Tolstoi's day, we do not know of them, for their novels have not endured., However, through his examination of man, and through man, society at large, Tolstoi has endured as the literary giant of his era.

For to investigate a man's psychological problems is to investigate his conflicts with the world in' which he lives.'"

In Chapter I, we noted S^ba to advocated several psychological approaches to the novel: the descent into the "I"; interior time; man's subconscious;- illogicality; the world as perceived from the "I"; the

"Other. "'^ These are the component parts of the psychoanalytical method that SSbato proposes. His goal is to penetrate as far as possible into man's mind, and these are his tools. Thus, it is natural he should attack Robbe-Grillet's phenomenological theories of character portrayal. In SSbato's view, some of the most important characters in literature are extensions of the author himself. And although the author may not "know" his characters completely (just as

his characters from - no one knows himself completely), he lives . within. They may escape his control (as dreams do), but they belong to him as much as his dreams. Solbato says that Robbe-Grillet's insistence on eliminating the inner life of characters from the novel must result from three factors: (1) the influence of the cinema, (2) the desire to achieve greater ambiguity, or (3) stupidity. The three 153

factors, he concludes, are not valid bases for literature, either separately or jointly.'^

Man's psyche for SSbato is an integral part of reality, perhaps the most important, if by reality we under'stand the broader vi6w espoused by today's novelists. Writers who occupy themselves with their characters' feelings, passions, ideas, and their subconscious and unconscious, are giving a fuller dimension to the external world which surrounds them,, for. it is only through his own subjectivity that man can apprehend the outside world.''' SSbato says that what is truly human in man is his soul— not his body, which is zoological, nor his

spirit ( esptritu ), which is his divine aspiration. The soul is a dark and shadowy region of man's being, capable of good and evil, and this imperfect part of man is the part most suited to examination by the novel— the imperfect, hybrid genre. A god, says Scfbato, would not write novels."* We should point out that SSbato does not claim to control his characters or even to understand them well. He recognizes the maxim that literary characters take on an, independent life of their own as the novel progresses. Often they may begin to act in ways contradictory to the role the author originally laid out for them,

'^ -and he can .only watch them unfold in amazement and surprise.

. Another view of human psychology in the theory of the novel is

Jos€ Donoso's. His El obsceno pgjaro de la noche deals in psychological examination. Donoso admits to extensive psychoanalysis himself, and is especially drawn to the schizophrenic aspect of human character. He states: "...I don't believe that a psychological unity exists in the human being. I have taken too many pills; I've smoked grass; too many 154

psychological accidents have happened to me to believe that I am

"^^ one single person. I am thirty persons and I'm nobody. Donoso exemplifies this idea in his juxtaposition of characters (he cites

the mistress and the servant in El obsceno pcijaro de la noche ) who are opposing manifestations of a single personality, like the two faces of Janus.

Another facet of Donoso's psychological concepts is his theory of reaching his characters' unconscious through his own. In his earlier novels, he says, he was seeking to give the conscious part of his own unconscious— that is, a controlled unconscious. In El obsceno pgjaro

de la noche , however, he believes that he withdrew completely, giving his unconscious free rein to chase whatever ghosts were haunting it.

Writing this" novel was a totally unplanned experience. The writing itself dictated the blueprint of the novel. The novel evolved rather like a "happening. "''' (Although Donoso doesnot use the term, the surrealist technique of automatic writing is clearly involved here.)

Several contemporary novelists, including Julio Cort^zar, react against the "psychological" novel. CortSzar's Morel li advocates presenting the characters to the reader without explaining their conduct: "Negarse a hacer psicologtas y osar al mismo tiempo poner a un lectoi—^a un cierto lector, es verdad— en contacto con un mundo

personal , con una vivencia y una meditaci6n personales. . . Ese lector carecerci de todo pliente, de toda ligaz6n intermedia, de toda articulacidn causal. Las cosas en bruto: conductas, resultantes, rupturas, catlstrofes, irrisiones. "'^ That is, the author should penetrate into his characters but not with the purpose of explaining why they act as 155

they do: "Basta ^de novel as heddnieas, premasticadas, con pslcologfas.

Hay que tenderse al maximo, ser voyant como querfa Rimbaud. El

novelista hed6nico no es m^s que un voyeur . Por otro lado, basta

de ticnicas puramente descriptivas, de novelas 'del comportamiento,'

meros guiones de cine sin el rescate de las im^genes."''^ By no means

does this mean that Cortcizar is uninterested in man. Indeed, man

is of major concern to him. In his earlier,' fantastic literature, he

had been satisfied with an esthetically pleasing resolution to his

stories. But, his short story "El perseguidor" was the turning point

for him, when he realized that literary solutions were no longer enough;

he felt that he had to deal with something much closer to him— the human

condition. He took a good look at himself and his fellow man in "El

perseguidor," and has continued to do so ever since. ^° What he is

opposed to is the psychoanalytical approach to the characters in a book.

The accomplice reader must supply missing motivations' and explanations.

Another novelist opposed to the "psychological" approach is

Vargas Llosa. He denounces the "psychological" novel as such, saying

that by limiting its investigation to a single facet of man, it

necessarily limits our view of man.®^ This is not to say, however, that

-Irian is not the focus of the novel— he is, and must be. As vie have seen

before, the center of attention in the contemporary novel is on. man

rather than on nature. But Vargas Llosa, like Cortlzar, does not analyze:

"I'm convinced... that the novel is basically a description of acts.

The successful novel is the one that manages to portray or describe

Individual characters, social problems, even purely physical realities

through a sequence of acts, of actions. '' Everything else must, as it 156

were, transpire from these actions. Ideas, problems, moral considerations,

the Author's philosophy, must radiate from a story. ..".^^

Increasing "personalization: the novel of inner life"^^ is

espoused by Carlos Fuentes. But he does not advocate a psychoanalytical approach. Neither does Alejo Carpentier, who confesses

to hating what he calls "the little psychological novel. "^"^ Gabriel

Garcia M^rquez likewise disdains analyzing his characters'- actions.

He says he is not interested in psychology

...because that would need a scientific training which I don't possess. The opposite happens. I develop my characters and work on them, in the belief that I'm only making use of their poetical aspects. When a character has been assembled, some of the experts tell me that this is a psychoanalytic analysis. And I'm confronted

then with a series. of scientific assumptions that I don't hold and have never even dreamed of. In Buenos Aires— a city of psychoanalysts, as you know— some of them held a meeting to analyze One Hundred Years of

Solitude . They came to the conclusion that it represented a well -sublimated Oepidus complex, .and goodness knows what else. They discovered that the characters were perfectly coherent from a psychoanalytic point of view, they seemed like case histories What interested me was that the aunt should go to bed with her nephew, not the psychoanalytic origins of this event. ^^

Garcta Mcirquez denies not only any psychological intent in his Cien aFios de soledad , but also any sociological , metaphysical or symbolic intentions:

I merely wanted to tell the story of a family who for a hundred years did everything they could to prevent having a son with a pig's tail, and just because of- their very efforts to avoid having one they ended by doing so. Synthet- ically speaking, that's the plot- of the book, but all that about symbolism. ..not at all. Someone who isn't a critic said that the interest the novel had aroused was probably due to the fact that it was the first real description of the private life of a Latin American family.. .we go into the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, into every corner of the house. Of course I never said to myself, "I shall write a book that will be interesting for that reason," but now that it's written, and this has been said about it, I think it may be true. Anyway it's an interesting concept and not all that shit about a man's destiny, etc ".^® 157

In conclusion, the consensus among today's novelists seems to be

that man is and must be the center of attention in today's novel. But

the novelists react negatively to the psychoanalytical approach which gives a logical rationale for man's actions. Writers today are concerned only with presenting man and his actions. The reader is then free to

provide any missing information he may feel is necessary to complete the total picture.

The Novel of Ideas; the Metaphysical Novel

The fpremost .proponent of the novel as an instrument for man's metaphysical search for the ultimate meaning of life and human existence

is Ernesto S^bato. He says that the literature of our time may have denied logic and reason as the sole valid means toward such knowledge and understanding, but that does not imply a concurrent rejection of thought. The contemporary novel does not deny that men think— it merely denies that, in fiction as in real life, they obey the laws of logic.

Indeed, never as today has literature been so filled with ideas and so intent on getting to know its subject—man. ^' Man's uniqueness today stems from the fact that not only does he not know what he is, but now he knows that he does not know. In such circumstances, SSbato asks.how literature could be other than one of metaphysical investigation.

These philosophic questions do not belong only in treatises; they haunt man in his daily life.^®

SSbato, as we noted previously, considers the search for knowledge as one of the principal characteristics of the contemporary novel.

This search for knowledge became important when man understood that 158

the physical world was not the sum totaT of man's reality, but that

feelings, emotions, dreams and myths played a part. Then novelists

realized that literature could also be an instrument of knowledge of man's condition, just as philosophy had been before. In fact, the

novel's ambiguous, contradictory, total character possibly; made it

the best vehicle to that end.^^ For a novel is not bound to present a consistent, logical view of the world. Seibato asks which concept of the world was really Cervantes'— that of Don Quixote or that of Sancho

Panza. The answer is probably that Cervantes tended in two directions, or perhaps in both simultaneously. Despite these inconsistencies,

Sabato states that, when one finishes reading a great novel, one has the feeling of having witnessed a particular vision of the world and of human existence, even though it may have been expressed through a vague general feeling or tone rather than through an actual statement of philosophical position. ^° All great novels of all periods and from all nations have a Weltanschauung , that is, they give us a vision of the world and, by extension, the meaning of man's existence. But the novel, as we saw before, does not demonstrate— it simply shows.'*

The central question of today's novel for CortSzar is the why and the wherefore (el por qug y el para qug ) of man's existence, as noted earlier. In this, it differs from the earlier novel, which sought to show what man was like. Today, the novel is the best verbal instrument for capturing and examining man's condition.'^

Novels should be a reflection of questions concerning human existence that have disturbed the novelist, according to Eduardo

Mallea. Each of his books reflects a revealing human situation through 159

the conflicts portrayed in it. The leitmotiv of his novels is the metaphysical search for a meaning in life, a search which he admits may sometimes overwhelm the reader. But, despite his obyious metaphysical concerns, Mai lea says that his greatest desire is to be a narrator, not a thinker or philosopher. He confesses that at times he may have lacked imagination, putting ideas or reflections in his novels where action would have been preferable. But he is

certain that he was not born to be intellectual , to handle ideas.''

It is not necessary to look for the metaphysical dimension, in

Vargas Llosa's view. He is interested in capturing, or rather in recreating, the reality which is man's daily experience. The purpose of literature for him is to give man greater access to reality.

Literature is an instrument of knowledge, but the ponderous level of metaphysics is missing. '"• The reader, however, may draw metaphysical inferences from his works.

Representing the antithesis of S^bato in this respect is Jos^

Donoso, who thinks literature should not be a vehicle for expressing profound ideas. He says he would like for people to say about him what

1. S. Eliot said about Henry James: "He had a mind so fine that never the shadow of an idea violated it." He is not interested in novels of ideas, he says, because he does not believe either in their validity, their truth or their permanence. For. him, literature is something much more dream-like, subconscious, intuitive. He states: "If I want to express practical ideas I'm not going to express them in a novel. If

I write a novel, it won't be to express an' idea I saw in an essay.

As Gertrude Stein once said: 'Remarks are not literature.'"'^ 160

The Urban Novel

There is a decided tendency in today's novel to move the locale

from the countryside to the rapidly expanding cities of Spanish America.

Carpentier proclaims that the great task which awaits the Spanish

American author is to inscribe the physiognomy of her great cities on universal literature, in the way that James Joyce did with Dublin.

He says that novelists have been doing this ever since Balzac, but since the cities of Spanish America are beginning to "talk" now in their own special way, today's novel must find an appropriate new way to

^^ capture th^is new urban existence.

The irony of the indigenista novels of Peru has already been pointed out by Vargas Llosa: the audience for such novels was essentially an urban, educated one, for whom the Andean Indian and his problems were far away and exotic. Vargas Llosa sought to remedy this

situation in La ciudad . y los perros In it, Peruvian readers ( limenos in particular) could "verify" what they v/ere reading according to their own experiences. The streets named in the novel are real streets in

Lima, with which the reader can establish immediate identification.

The language also reflects the Spanish spoken in Lima, providing another point of contact. Institutions and daily occurrences are also familiar to the Lima reader. The result is an urban novel, directed toward an urban reading public (the vast majority in Peru), which responds more closely to the present-day reality of Peru. Vargas

Llos^ hopes that seeing everyday reality reflected in a book will make the reader take stock of his world and become conscious of the multiple aspectsof the reality which surrounds him daily and which he tends to take for granted.^' 161

Discussing the critics'. reactions to his novel Sbbre heroes y tumbas, Ernesto SIbato says he is very pleased that they saw in the novel two things: (1) a treatment of the great metaphysical questions of solitude, the meaning of existence and death; and (2) Buenos Aires asthe true protagonist of the novel. The novel is indeed the story of a whole city, he says, in which individual human dramas are played out.' The huge, impersonal city provides a perfect background for the portrayal of human loneliness and existential anguish. SSbato suggests that in an even broader context, the protagonist could be all of

Argentina.'^

The city of Havana is similarly the protagonist of Cabrera Infante's

Tres tristes tigres . His purpose and focus are somewhat different, however. As we have seen, he was seeking to capture a gallery of

Cuban voices before they disappiear into laconism. Cabrera Infante's characters are not engaged in metaphysical soul-searching, however.

And Cabrera does not attempt to portray the entire city. His focus is limited to the night-club district of pre-revolutionary Havana and the people who frequent the night spots of the Rampa— people of a very gregarious, fun-loving, loquacious nature. Cabrera considers Tres

"^^ tristes tigres a "poem about Havana.

Although they do not speak of the importance of the urban setting in their novels, other Spanish American novelists are evidently partisans of the city-oriented novel— one thinks immediately of CortSzar's

Rayuela (practically his entire production, in fact) and Fuentes' La

regidn mgis transparente . However, not all of today's novelists subscribe to the urban-oriented novel. Several of them still prefer 162

.the countryside--Asturias, Rulfo, Garcfa M^rquez, and even Carpentier.

Asturias has. spoken out against the "urbanizing" tendency of the novel:

"...our problem, is to create a literature which speaks neither of asphaltj

nor glass, nor concrete. It must speak of the freshness of the earth,

the seed, the tree. Our literature has to give a new scent, a new

color and vibration. "'°''

Alienation

Closely connected to the urban theme and metaphysics is man's

alienation— a theme which is prevalent in all contemporary Western

literature. Fuentes has spoken about the change from a society of

simple dialectics to one of bewildering complexity in which choices and directions are difficult. The writer is caught up in this fast- changing society, and suddenly finds himself relegated to the emerging

new urban middle class— the petite bourgeoisie— , no longer a member of

the social elite as before. While the expanding middle class meant more potential readers for the author's novels, this bonanza was offset by his suddenly being surrounded by a class whose material goals—automobiles,, televisions, stereos^were alien to the writer.

Thus, the novelist felt alienated from his own society. Fuentes says that no writer in Spanish America perceived this basic alienation faster or more clearly than Juan Carlos Onetti, whose novels of human loneliness are the foundation of our alienated modern urban life. Fuentes mentions other authors— Martinez Moreno, Benedetti, Donoso, Revueltas, Sergio

Ferncindez, SSbato^whose works round out the opening scenario of the new Latin American city dweller. ^°^ 163

Modern : technology is one of the principal causes of this alienation, according to Ernesto SSbato. Machinery is turning man into an object and piling him into huge, anonymous cities, where old family structures easily break down, causing social instability and a feeling of transi- toriness. Man's natural loneliness is accentuated in the urban milieu.

SSbato sees, this as one of the main reasons why man turns to fiction— to

^"^ fill the void, to invent and complement a reality which is lacking.

Every novelist writes only one great book in his lifetime, says

Garcia Marquez, no matter how many separate volumes that novelist may produce. The book that he is writing, he says, is a book on the theme of solitude. From his earliest stories to the novel he is working on

now ( El otono del patriarca , a study of a lonely, aging dictator), human loneliness has been his theme. He points to Colonel Aureliano

Buendta in Cien anos de soledad as being a study of a progression toward solitude, through the wars he fought and his accession to power. The individual characters in Cien afios de soledad are not only solitary, but there is an anti-solidarity among them— everyone acts independently.^"^

Literature, in order to portray this spirit of alienation, is moving toward abstraction of characters, according to CortSzar's alter ego, Morelli. Morelli states" "La novela que nos interesa no es la que va colocando los personajes en la situacifin, sino la que instala la situacidn en los personajes. Con lo cual dstos dejan.de ser personajes para volverse personas."^"" (The etymological root of persona is the Greek word for "mask.") That is, the characters cease to be living beings and become mere human types, reacting to given situations. The ultimate. result of this movement toward abstraction 164

will be Cortazar's idea of "figures" (see Chapter VII), the completely

dehumanized being.

The Difficult, Obscure, Complex Novel

One of the characteristics of the contemporary novel is its

complexity and the difficulties it presents to the reader. This responds

in great part to the breakdown of the old polarities of Latin American

life and the emergence of a new, complex, urban, consumer society, which

Fuentes describes. Vargas Llosa says essentially the same thing, defining the novel as a "verbal representation of reality": if the novel is to represent reality verbally, it must be as extensive and as intense as reality itself. We can approach reality from many different angles, from opposing points of view. The impressions we receive may be complex, confusing, yet contradictory. The novel offers this same complexity. ^"^

A more analytical point of view is employed by Ernesto Scfbato.

He notes several reasons why today's novel should be more obscure and offer more difficulty than the traditional novel. ^"^r

(1) the point of view: the omniscient narrator, similar to God in his all-seeing power, has practically disappeared from the novel.

Novels are now written from the perspective of each character, and the total reality results from the crossing of the different versions, not always coherent nor in accord. The viewpoint today is as ambiguous as life itself.

(2) astronomical time, which is the same for everyone, has given way to interior, psychic, time. 165

(3) today's novel does not offer that logic which the old novel

offered, written under the influence of a rationalistic spirit.

(4) the appearance of the subconscious and the unconscious,

obscure worlds par excellence .

. . (5) characters are not described but rather act in our presence,

reveal themselves through words and acts which, when not accompanied by analysis or interior descriptions, are opaqufe and ambiguous.

Given such characteristics, it is natural that the novel should

tend toward ambiguity, complexity and confusion rather than toward clarity. S^bato speaks at length of what he calls the "descent into

the I" ( descenso alyo), the submersion into shadowy zones of the human psyche, which often produces a ghost-like, nocturnal tone reminding us of dreams or nightmares, such as in Franz Kafka's The Trial (or S^lbato's

Sobre hlroes y tumbas) . In this psychic underground, the law of day and light gives way to the law of night and shadows.^"' This leads to one of the main elements of Scibato's novel istic theory; the relation between day and night, between prose and poetry. He tells us that when he started writing Sobre heroes' y tumbas his intention was to write a novel which would have two faces— a diurnal and a nocturnal one. On

-the diurnaT surface, there would be several characters who would: revolve around a practically hidden character (Fernando Vidal), one who would stand out because of his absence and because of the fascination he holds for the remaining characters. The second part ("El informe sobre ciegos") was to be the dream or nightmare of that hidden, central character— the nocturnal side of the first part of the book. ^''^- SSbato goes on to state that prose is diurnal while poetry is nocturnal— it is 166

the language of shadows and abysses, it feeds on monsters and symbols.

For this reason, there can be no great novel which in the long run is not poetic. '°' For the deepest region of the human soul is a reigion of dreams and myths which man can reach only through poetry. That is why

Sabato defends the depiction of the irrational (poetic) side of man's

^^^ character.

El obsceno pajaro de la noche is a good, example of a "difficult" novel, and its author Jos6 Donoso tells us why it is so hard to understand:

... The Obscene Bird of Night ... is one of the titles the

flovel has had. Another one. The Last of the Azcoitta , was quickly discarded. It has had thirty different names, among others. Under So Many Eyelids ... What does this reflect? That basically. I don't know what my novel is about. There is no intention of a precise meaning. It is a novel whose development has neither been lineal, nor completely planned. It's been something like a "happening," something that's happened to me, that has

been killing me and that I have been killing, that I've been tearing piece by piece out of me, branches have been growing all over it. It's a living thing. It's something that has happened to me rather than something I've written.^**

In such a novel, the best the reader can hope for is to somehow share the author's experience, to participate vicariously in the "happening."

Although he is hot psychoanalytically oriented like Donoso,

Asturias has a rather similar theory in his writings' dealing with the essence of the Indian soul. He seeks to explore the Indian mentality on its own terms, and clarity and easy comprehension are of no concern to him: "In Hombres de matz there are no concessions. There is no story line. Whether things are clear or not doesn't matter. They are simply given. ""^ 167

In such novels as Hombres de matz . El obsceno pajaro de la

reader - noche and Sobre heroes y tumbas , it is no wonder that the . often feels confused and disoriented, perhaps even reluctant to / continue dov/n a road he feels he does not "understand" (Donoso, at least, would argue that understanding plays.no part in his novel). Guillermo Cabrera Infante warns against a novel which becomes

too hermetic or too private. He says; •

...the creation of a unique and therefore hermetic language, full of multiple and secret associations exclusive to the writer and elaborated in a work of

literature, as is the case in Finnegan's Wake , exhibits language as it is not, for this literary neo-language is badly in need of explanations, scholia or skeleton keys to explainnot the whole book, which would be an aesthetic or rhetorical achievement, but to clarify a single sentence. This has nothing to do with language communication but with its absolute opposite— •cryptoTogy, the disguise of language through cipher. In other words: the contrary of communication: that failure of language which represents any writing that .is deliberately hieroglyphic.^ ^^

Themes

The selection of themes, despite its obvious importance in the writing of any novel, is not a major concern in the theory expressed by today's novelists. Following a tradition which dates back to romantic and modernist literature, the general contention is that each novelist should seek his own directions and that there must be no restrictions on what is and is not narrative material. This attitude is predictable in the light of the prevailing search for open and total novelistic

and of forms the current broad interpretation what constitutes reality. ,

Such broad themes as man's loneliness, anguish and lack of communication have already been mentioned in previous chapters by specific authors. 168

But no consensus exists among today's authors concerning what a novelist's themes should be.

Carlos Fuentes cites the three early archetypal themes of traditional

Spanish American literature: nature, dictatorship, and the suffering masses. ^^"^ These, he states, have been superseded as .specific themes in recent years. One of the principal themes in today's novels is the

niythical refoundation of America. He cites La casa verde , Cien anos de

as soledad , Pedro P|ramo, El lugar sin Ifmites and Lo£ pasos perdidos examples of novel istic refoundation, a return to the act of genesis to redeem the original violation: the enormous rape which was the ^^^ Spanish conquest of America and which filled the continent with bastards.

(Fuentes' obsession with the theme of the hi jo de la chingada is typically

Mexican and not found among other writers.)

What particular themes a novelist should prefer is not discussed by Solbato. He says only that an author's theme must be his obsession, or his novels will not be profound. Such an obsession arises from deep within his psyche, and a true creator will always write only about that one theme. The novelist does not choose this theme— it chooses him, pursuing him through the years. '^^ That is what has happened to him, he says; his two novels El tunel and Sobre hiroes y tumbas are separated by thirteen years and different plots, but they deal with the

same theme. ^^^

Themes are "demons" which pursue an author in Vargas Llosa's view.

These demons may be people, dreams, myths, facts or events which have

been engraived on his spirit. He attempts, through his writing, to

"exorcise" these demons. The process of narrative creation, he declares. 169

consists of the transformation of the demon into a theme, thereby

converting individual experience into universal experience. ^^^

Wg have already seen that, according to Garefa M^rquez, a v/riter

writes only one book in his lifetime, although it may have multiple

^^' volumes. And Julio Cortazar echoes Sabato's statement that the

theme chooses the novelist rather than vice-versa. ^^^ Augusto Roa

Bastos synthesizes the matter when he states that all of America has

become "novel istic" (novel esca ), for it is a continent in ferment in

which man constantly faces a changing society and must learn to cope

with it. The story of Latin American man against the continuum of

Latin American geography and nature provides infinite material for the

Latin American novelist. Given these circumstances, a novelist cannot afford to restrict himself to the narrow confines of literature of ' protest or "message" literature. The novelist must follow only the dictates of his own inspiration (or demon, or obsession). V^* 170

NOTES . .

Vargas Llosa, La novel a , pp,i 4-5.

^Ibid., pp. 3-5.

^Gonzalez Bermejd, Cosas deescri tores , pp. 55-58.

''Sabato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , pp. 37-40.

^Fuentes, La nueva novel a hispanoamericana , pp. 65-69.

^Harss, Into the Mainstream , p. 356.

'Fuentes, "Situacion del escritor en America Latina," pp. 10-13.

^Vargas Llosa, Garcta Mdrquez : Historia de un deicidio, " pp. 133-134.

^Fuentes, "Situacion del escritor en America Latina," p. 14.

*°Garcta Flores, "Siete respuestas de Julio CortSzar," p. 11.

^^Armando Duran, "Conversacipnes con Gabriel Garcia Mcfrquez," Revista Nacidnal de Cultura (Caracas), July-September 1968, p. 29.

^'^Ibid. . pp. 29. 31.

^^Tiempo, "41 preguntas a Ernesto Scibato," pp. 15-16.

^•Simo et al., Cinco miradas sobre Cortcizar , pp.. 84-86.

15 Vargas Llosa, "The Latin American Novel Today: Introduction." p. 9.

^^Fuentes, "Situaci<5n del escritor en America Latina," pp. 18-19..

'^Fuentes, La nueva novel a hispanoamericana , pp. 95-96.

>«Ibid., p. 58. \

'^Carpentier. tientos y diferencias , pp. 118-121.

• ^"Harss, op. cit., p. 337. .

2^Cited in Collazos et al., Literatura en la revoluci6n ~y revolucion en la literatura , pp. 28-29.

.^^Sabato," El escritor y sus fantasmas , pp. 48-49.

"Ibid., p. 94. 171

2-Ibid., p. 147.,

; 25l5^d_^ p, -152.

^nbid., pp. 176-177.

. ^"Cortgzar, Ultimo round , p. 214, "planta baja."

28QQ^t^2ar,."Situaci6n de la novela," p. 229.

2'Rosario Castellanos, "La novela mexicana contemporSnea y su

valor testimonial," Hispania , May 1964, p. 230.

^"Corrales Egea, "Una charla con Miguel Angel Asturias," p. 4.

^ ^Vargas Llosa, "The Latin American Novel Today: Introduction," pp. 12, 15.

?^Vargas Llosa, La novela , p. 21.

• ^^Mario Vargas Llosa, Dta domingo (Buenos Aires: Amadfs, 1971), pp. 62-63. (JuTio CortSzar echoes this idea of the novelist as the constant agitator v/ho forces society to endlessly reevaluate itself: Gonzalez Bermejo, op. cit., p. 99). ,^

^•Mario Vargas Llosa, "Una insurreccion permanente," Arbol de letras (Chile), n.d.., n.p.

'^Vargas Llosa, La novela , p. 19.

^^Mario Vargas Llosa, "El escritor como aguafiestas," Arbol de letras (Chile), December 1, 1967, p. 3.

3 'Vargas Llosa et al., Antologfa mfnima 'de M. Varqas Llosa, pp. 125-128.

^^^Cabrera Infante, "Las fuentes de Ta narracidn," p. 48.

^^Guibert, Seven Voices , p. 408.

""Collazos et al., op. cit., pp. 11-12.

*^Ibid., p. 65.

"^Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana . pp. 11-12.

'*'Guibert, op. cit., p. 149.

"'•ibid., pp. 149-151.

V^Ibid., pp. 174-175. 172

^^Harss, op. cit,., pp. 92-93.

'•''Euclides VSzquez Candela, "Tpdo el pats se ha echado a andar" (Interview with Alejo Carpentier), Granma, April 6, 1969, p. 10.

'*°Carpentier, Tientos y diferehcias , pp. 31-34.

El •^^Sabato, escritor y sus fahtasmas . pp. 44-45.

^''Tiempo, op. cit., p.. 16.

^^Carlos Fuentes. Tiempo mexicano~ (Mexico: Joaqufn Mortiz, 1972), pp. 59-64.

"Fuentes, "Situactidn del escritor en America Latina," p. 20.

"Harss, op. cit., p. 309.

^'*"Mario Vargas Llosa," (an interview by Kal Wagenheim), p. 4.

^^GonzSlez. Bermejo, op. cit., p. 76.

^^Donoso, Historia personal del "boom" , p. 103.

^'Domingo, "Entrevistas: Gabriel Garcfa M^lrquez," p. 6.

^'DurSn, "Conversaciones con Gabriel Garcfa MSrquez," p. 29.

^ ^Andres Amoros, "Gabriel Garcfa mrquez habla de polftica y de literatura," Indice , Nov. 1968, p. 32. •

^"Cortdzar, Ultimo round , pp. 210-212.

^^Manuel Dfaz Martinez, "Cuatro preguntas a Julio Cortazar," —La Gaceta de Cuba , Feb. 20, 1967, p. 3.

^^Cortazar, La vuelta al dfa en ochenta mundos, p. 213.

.^^Collazos et al., op. cit., pp. 56-58.

^"Cortazar, Ultimo round , p. 75, "primer piso."

"Ibid., p. 125, "planta baja."

^.^Gonzalez Bermejo, op. cit., p. 122

^^Cortazar, "Algunos aspectos del cuento," p. 185.

^^Collazos et al., op. cit., pp. 73-74.

^'Simo et al., op. cit. p. 114. 173

7o$gbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , pp. 33-34.

^^Ibid., pp. 86-89.

^^Ibid., p. 123.

'^Ibid., p. 126.

'"Ibid., pp. 180-184.

75i 'Ibid., p. 175.

'^Emir Rodrfguez Monegal , "The Novel as Happening: an Interview with Jos6 Donoso," Review (Fall 1973), p. 36.

"Ibid., pp. 37-39.

'^Cortazar, Rayuela , p. 497.

''^Ibid,, p.. 544.

^"Harss, op. cit., pp. 223-224.

^^Vargas Llosa et al. , Antologta mtnima de M. Vargas Llosa , p. 141

^^Harss, op. cit., p. 460.

^'Ibid., p. 308.

^^Guibert, op. cit., p. 315.

^^Ibid., p. 314.

^'SSbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , pp. 25-26.

««Ibid.. p. 40.

«^Ibid., pp. 88-89.

5°Ibid., p. 202.

3»Ibid., p. 266.

^^CortSzar, "Situaci6n de la novela," p. 228.

^^Rivelli, "Entrevista a Eduardo Mallea en Buenos. Aires," p. 193.

^^Harss, op. cit. , pp. 360-361. \ 17.4

^^Rodriguez Konegal , "The Novel as Happening: an Interview with Jos§ Donoso," p. 39.

^^Carpentier, Tientos y diferencias , pp. 12-13.

^^Vargas Llosa et al. , AntologTa mfiiima de M. Vargas Llosa . pp. 125-127.

'^SoFbatQ, "Por una novel a novel esca y metaftsica," pp. 10-11.

'^Cabrera Infante, "Las fuentes de la narracidn," p. *47.

'""Harss, op. cit. , pp. 84-85.

"^Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana , pp. 28-29.

'°^SSbato, "Por una novela novelesca y metaftsica," pp. 11-12.

'"^Guibert, op. cit., p. 314.

""*Corto[zar, Rayuela , p. 543.

"^Vargas Llosa, La novela , pp. 2-3.

"^Sgbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 197.

^"'Alegrfa, "La novela total: un di^logo con SSbato," p. 18.

'"^SSbato, "Por una novela novelesca y metaffsica," p. 18.

^"^Sgbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p: 209.

^"Tiempo, op. cit., p. 16.

^'Rodriguez Monegal, "The Novel as Happening: an Interview with Jose Donoso," pp. 34-35.

^^Harss, op. cit., p. 87.

^^Guibert, op. cit., pp. 417-418.

^"Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana , p. 11.

^^ibid. , pp. 45-46.

^^Sgbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 182.

'^'SSbato, "Por una novela novelesca y metaffsica," p. 15.

•^^Vargas Llosa, Garcta Mlrquez : Histdria de un deicidio , pp. 86-87. 175

^^^GonzSlez Bermejo, op. clt., p. 18.

^^oibid., p. 129.

'^^Augusto Roa Bastos, "Latinoamerica: continente novelesco" iri "Introduccion a la narrativa latinoamericana," Latihoamericana, Dec. 1972, pp. 12-14. — CHAPTER V

TIME AND MYTH IN THE -NOVEL

Time

The deliberate distortion of time is one of the most evident and disconcerting aspects of the contemporary novel. Linear, chronological time as we know it in the nineteenth-century novel is often altered, destroyed or sus.pended in today's novel. The reader can no longer assume. any logical, sequential progression from the beginning of the novel to the end. As exemplified in Alejo Carpentier's Guerra del

tiempo and his short novel El acoso , time is one of the novelists' major tools in creating the "new novel."

In Chapter I, we noted that Ernesto SSbato listed as one of the characteristics of the new novel a shift from astronomical, chronological time to the inner, psychic, subjective time of man's mind. As the novelist focuses on this inner time, the reader may become confused, for the inner time is different for each character, and in any given work, various chronological levels may coexist.^ Scibato uses his own novel Sobre hgroes y tumbas to illustrate his special perception of time: for him, man lives simultaneously in. the past, the present and the future. In the present, he is naturally caught up in the "here and now." In the past, he relives events, summoning up memories. And he lives in the future to the extent he makes plans for tomorrow.^ SO, although man is aware of the passing of chronological time in the present, he mentally

.carries the past and future along with him in what Lezama Lima. calls

176 :

177

the "flying point" of time,^ which renders time a relative, personal, subjective concept.

Cyclical or simultaneous time is one variation of linear time, and

is exemplified in Cien anos. de soledad . As Carlos Fuentes points out, in Macondo, time moves, but goes nowhere: the book ends at the same point where it began. Hence the significance of Jos^ Arcadio Buendfa's decision that it will always be Monday, and of Ursula's comment: "Es como si el tiempo diera vueltas en reddndo y hubi^ramos vuelto al principio."** The novel transpires in an unending present. Fuentes refers to this as "dead time" and tells how he sought to incorporate

this concept into La region mgs transparente :

I was interested in time play, and [Dos Passos', Faulkner's, and D. H. Lawrence's] different ways of looking at time were helpful to me. Apart from whatever tendency a first novel may have to be a showcase of literary parentage, I was reading Dos Passos a lot, looking for a way to build dead time into a novel. In Dos Passos everything is in the past tense. Even when he places his action in the present, we know it is past. In Faulkner, everything is in the chronic present. Even the remotest past is present. And in D. H. Lawrence what you find is a tone of prophetic inminence. He is always on the brink of the future; it is always there, latent. So I very consciously drew on those three influences, three aspects of time I wanted to counterpoint and overlap in La regidn mcis transparente .^

This "deadening" of time in effect serves to cancel it out as a factor in the novel— the novel then seems to transcur outside the limits of time.

The juxtaposition of two separate times in a single narrative unity is illustrated by Garcia MSrquez in connection with his newest novel

El otono del patriarca . Time as a chronological flow is absolutely of no importance to him, he says. In this novel: '

178

...un dta el dictador despierta. Es un dictador que ha sido puesto por los infantes de marina que un dta se van, previa firma de un tratado que les garantiza la adiTiinistraci6n vitalieia de las aduanas y el derecho a volver a ocupar el pats en caso de recrudecimiento de la fiebre amarilla; se van y dejan un acorazado en el Puerto que queda pudri^ndose. Un dfa el dictador despierta y se levanta y encuentra que todo el mundo en el palacio tiene bonetes colorados: las criadas que est^n barriendo, los tipos que traen la leche, los ordenanzas que estcin descargando hortalizas. Entonces pregunta qud estSf pasando que todo el mundo tiene bonetes colorados. Dicen: "Mire, es que han llegado unos tipos muy raros que han venido cargados de bonetes colorados y todo lo cambian por bonetes colorados: los huevos de iguana, la manteca de caimcin, los cueros de caiman, el tabaco, el chocolate, todo, todo Ip que usted tiene sie lo cambian el los por bonetes colorados." Entonces el dictador, que nunca dice nada sino que primero piensa, digiere, se pregunta iqu§ cono es esto?, abre. la ventana que da al mar y ve el mar, y el acorazado de los infantes, detr^s del acorazado, ve las tres carabelas fondeadas: ha llegado Cristdbal Coldn. Por esto vercis como estoy tratando el problema del tiempo. A mf me importa que todo esto haya sido historia en un momento; ahora, el orden cronoldgico no me importa en absoluto.^

Cort^zar repeats Garcta MSrquez's technique of combining disparate

historical times into one narration. Morelli, Cort5zar's alter ego,

states that it is a mistake to postulate a single, absolute, historical

time in a novel. There are different although parallel times which exist

together. In terms of this theory, one of the times of the Middle Ages • can coexist with one of the times of the Modern Age. If they can exist side by side, inseparably, in the mind of the author, they can do so in the novel .

Yet another experimentation with time is the subjective expansion or contraction of it in a character's mind. Cort^zar tells how he mentally relived three whole months of his life which he spent with a friend, hunt- ing and camping in the Argentine jungle near the Paraguayan border. One 179

day, years later, the entire three month's experience returned to him in minute detail in the two minutes and ten seconds it took a Parisian subway to carry him from one station to the next. Cort^zar says that if it is possible to be mentally transported from one epoch to another^ and to condense three months into a little over two minutes, then perhaps man has the possibility of triggering this phenomenon voluntarily, to multiply and divide time, to literally escape chronological time. He does not. know how it can be done,, but he sees such experiences as his own on the subway in Paris^ as an open doorway leading to a possible escape- from time.' Cort^zar goes on to say that, as he understands them, both time and space are basically only working hypotheses which man—the new man sought by the characters in Rayuela—may someday, somehow, be able to break or modify.^" -

Despite the prominent role which experimentation with time plays in the contemporary novel, the preceding is all the theoretical material we were able to find on the subject. Many aspects of time in the novel are thus not covered here— for example, the stream of consciousness technique, which implies a subjective distortion and/or a slowing down of chronological time.

Myth

Considering the prominent part that myth plays in the contemporary novel,, it is surprising to find, as in the preceding case with the subject of time, a very limited amount of theoretical expos iti.on on its role in the works of today's Spanish American novelists. Of the contemporary writers, Miguel Angel Asturias discusses the role of myth most extensively. 180

He states that his use' of Indian myths springs from his Mayan origins and

his studies of Mayan religion and mythology at the Sorbonne: "I respond

to an animist necessity to express myself on the basis of that grand

synthesis which is the myth. .. .these are not "dead beliefs which I try

to revive but beliefs existing today among the Guatemalan indigenes.

I use these myths therefore..., not with any deliberate intention but

as part of my way of being. "^^ One strongly suspects that Asturias

does have a deliberate intention in mind,- however: that of portraying

the collective Indian mentality through mythic embodiments'. Asturias

believes that countries like Guatemala are particularly receptive to

myths. He says that dictators like Estrada Cabrera (the real-life model

for the dictator in. El senor presidente ) appear only in mythological ly

minded countries, such as Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru,

Venezuela, Cuba and- Haiti— countries with large Indian or Negro popula-

tions. Although he knew Estrada Cabrera personally, Asturias did not

attempt to portray him as a person in- the novel, but rather as a myth—

the all-powerful father-figure despot.*^

Asturias recounts how a" group of Russian students at the University

of Moscow asked him why there are so. many references to myths in Hombres

de matz , so much witchcraft and Si>rcery. For the Russian students, -these

things were false and spoiled the social protest in the book, which they

interpreted as its most important aspect. Asturias responded that it would be impossible for him to write about the native races of Guatemala without dealing with the witch doctors and sorcer^r^ ghosts, legends

and myths that are. very much alive and play a critical role in the daily

lives of the Guatemalan Indians. He says: "I think the basis for tny 181

work is the mythological one, its connection with the beliefs" and other aspects of the rustic, primitive, and mentally childish life of the

Indians, and advancing along this path I deal with the social problems

that concern them. In Hombres de matz , which is a mythological novel,

I show the constant struggle between the dealer in maize [for whom corn is merely a product, to be bought and sold] and the Indian [for whom corn is a sacred element, the basis of all life]..."^^ It is this aspect of the myth as a part of the living heritage of the Indian race' that

Asturias wishes to capture. He says that myths are a little like malaria: "Malaria appears as a headache, a stomach-ache; it festers and spreads. Which is 'more or less what myths do. They die hard."^"*

Even in advanced countries,, like those pf western Europe, Asturias says that rnyths persist. Those that die are replaced by new ones (such as the myth of speed). Although myths may have nearly disappeared from

European literature, the myths remain alive in the minds of many people.*^

Carlos Fuentes credits Asturias' use of indigenous myths as a very credible way of giving life and personality to the anonymous masses of

Guatemalan Indians. Through their ancestral beliefs and their "magic language," Fuentes states, the characters of Hombres de matz and Asturias' other indi genista novels come alive for the reader and set these books apart from the multitude of indi genista novels of social protest..^^

Turning to other authors but still on the subject of myth, Fuentes

says that Vargas LI osa in La casa verde . Juan Rulfo in Pedro Pgramo ,

Roa Bastos in Hijo de hombre and Garcfa M^rquez in El coronel no tiene quien le escriba achieve the enviable goal of turning traditional themes of the American hinterland into mythical literature. The locale and the 182

characters seem to be the same as in more traditional novels, but now

the jungle and the river have become a legendary backdrop— nature is

assimilated and real men and women now occupy center stage. ^' Fuentes

does not define what he means by "legendary backdrop," however.

Fuentes also considers that many of the contemporary novels have

as their theme the mythical refounding of America (see Chapter IV), of

which Cien afios de soledad is the best example.*^ This novel, he says,

follows the three stages of Spanish American history: Utopia, epic and

rnyth. The foundation of Macondo, like that of America, was predicated

on the- idea of Utopia— it is the promised land of new generations ("Los

hombres de la expedici6n se sintieron abrumados por sus recuerdos mcls

antiguos en aquel paratso de humedad y silencio, anterior al pecado

original"*'). Like the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, Macondo is an island

of the imagination,- from which Jos§Arcad:ii) invents the world, points

things out with his finger, then learns to name them and, finally, to

forget their names. But history moves in on this paradise, -and Utopia

is replaced by the epic: thirty- two civil wars, the banana boom, the

slaughter of the banana workers— history, commerce, and activity constitute the epic history of Macondo. When the boom ends and the flood appears, Macondo is "forgotten even by the birds." The survivors,

Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula, begin the third cycle of Macondo's history- its mythical existence. The simultaneous, renewable character of

Macondo's existence (through myth) is only clarified on the final page, when it is revealed that Melqutades, the gypsy who accompanied the foundation of Macondo one hundred years before, .had foreseen Macondo's history and written it down in a book which, when discovered and read, ended its mythical cycle. ^° 183

Fuentes goes on to say that through the myth, one can reduce the

past to human proportions, one can re-act ( reactuar) the past. This is the meaning of the great novels of Alejo Carpentier, he says, and indeed, this is what Fuentes himself was striving for in his novel

Zona sagrada .^^ An artist can create a new myth, in fact", as Juan

Rulfo does in Pedro Pciramo . Fuentes says that Rulfo surpasses the

"exterior myth" (old and worn-out, though consecrated^ through repetition) of the evil, powerful cacique and the suffering, anonymous masses. This

level exists in Pedro Pgramo , but it is overshadowed by a new, living myth: that of truth as a vision" granted to. the dead. In this novel, social and personal distinctions become blurred as the dead speak and recount the true story of Comala.^^

Alejo Carpentier, unlike Fuentes, does not speak directly of myths in his literary theories. As we have seen, however, he does refer to contextos "ct6nicos" which he defines as "...supervivencias de animismo, creencias, practicas, muy antiguas, a veces de un origen cultural sumamente respetable, que nos ayudan a enlazar ciertas realidades presentes con esencias culturales remotas, cuya existencia nos vincula con lo universal-sin-tiempo."^^ Carpentier also talks of today's novel' as tending naturally toward the epic, due to -the epic qualities of the contexts which make up contemporary Latin American life.^** These contextos ctSnicos are clearly mythical, ancestral in nature, linking contemporary man with his beginnings. Lbs pasos perdidos is proof of Carpentier's fascination with myth.

The mythical content of his novels is mentioned only in passing by

Vargas Llosa. He states that in La ciudad y los perros , he wanted to give 184

a mythical vision of the military school in addition to the factual one— a vision of a series of acts in which no one believes but everyone pretends to believe— conventional social laws and ideas. ^^ Thus, myth is defined in terms of the everyday life of modern urban man.^^

The novelist should beware of making a special effort to search for the mythical elements, however, says Julio CortSzar. He states that writing a novel, for him, entails the sounding of his own depths, a dialogue with his personal reality and his external circumstances. Novels are like trees, he believes, in that their leafy crown (the visible part) is nurtured by the unseen, primordial mystery of their roots. For that reason, CortSz-ar answers "no" when asked if he thinks novelists should abandon realism in order to search for myths and prophecies. These will be lateht in any. true creation of a talented author. He continues that even a realistic attitude from which all fantastic elements have been discarded, as in the novels of Vargas Llosa, will have the richness which contact with these primeval roots gives— a contact which in a different artistic temperament might engender rnyths and a fantastic, highly imaginative literature. CortSzar states that profundity cannot be obtained from the outside— it must arise naturally from within. For in the final analysis, the novel is its novelist, and only a novelist in contact, wi til the roots of his culture and his own self will be able to

^' create a truly profound novel.

We should conclude by pointing out that most of the theoretical material concerning myth deals with indigenous American myth or the ritual ization of daily American life. Missing from our authors' discussions are the classical mythologies of Greece and Rome and the Bible. These play an 185

important role in the contemporary novel, yet, with the exception of the brief reference to Cien anos de soledad and other novels as literary refoundings of America (reminiscent of the Biblical story of Genesis), classical mythology is not dealt with among today's Spanish American writers. 186.

• NOTES

^Sclbato, £1 escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 86.

^Scibato, "Por una novela novfelesca y metaffsica," p. 14.

^Gonzcilez, "Un pulpo en una jarra minoana," p. 15. .

"^Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana , p. 63.

^Harss, Into the Mainstream , pp. 294-295.

^GonzSlez Bermejo, Cosas de escritores , pp. 35-36.

^CortSzar, Rayuela , p. 545.

^Which he incorporated, incidentally, in Johnny's similar experience in "El perseguidor."

'GonzSlez Bermejo, op. cit.,. pp. 115-116.

^''Garcta Flores, "Siete respuestas de Julio Cortclzar," p. 12.

^^Fossey, "Miguel Angel Asturias on Literature," p. 354.

^^Harss, op. cit., pp. 79-80.

"Guibert, Seven Voices , pp. 152-153.

*'!Harss, op. cit., pp. 84-85.

^^Guibert, op. cit., p. 154.

^^Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana , pp. 24-26.

"Ibid., p. 36. .

' V^Ibid., pp. 45-46. •

"Quoted in Ibid., p. 60.

^"Ibid., pp. ,58-62.

^^Fuentes, "SituaciSn del escritor en America Latina," pp. 14-15.

^^Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano , p. 59.

^^Carpentier, Tientos y diferencias , p. 21.

"Ibid., pp. 40-41. 187

25ygpga5 Llosa et al.', Antologfa mfnima de M. Vargas Llosa , p. 142.

2 6ygl^aye already seen, in Chapter IV, Vargas Llosa 's analysis of Garcta M^rquez's use of mythifi cation in such stories as "Los funerales de la Mamci Grande," in which popular imagination and fantasy supplant the' actual facts of the story to create the myth surrounding Big Mama's funeral.

^'Dfaz Martinez, "Cuatro preguntas a Julio Cort^zar," p. 3. ^

CHAPTER VI

HUMOR AND SEX IN THE NOVEL

Humor

The contemporary writers have introduced a new element— humor— into the Spanish American novel, an element that had not frequently appeared there before. In our chapter on language, we examined a number of the techniques which are used today to create humorous effects. In this section, we are not concerned with the techniques of humor but rather with the novelists' reasons for using it.

Fuentes has stated, as we have seen, that Latin America has traditionally been a continent of "sacred texts," and he sees the

"profanation" of literature— its forays into hitherto forbidden areas

(e.g., humor)—as proof of the contemporary Spanish American novel's vitality. For the first time in their literary history, he says,

Spanish American books know how %6 laugh. ^ He credits Julio Cortdzar with introducing humor, accident and chance into the Spanish' American novel with Rayuela .

Indeed, CortSzar has the most to say of any of o'ur authors on the subject. His humor, irreverence and lack of solemnity in Rayuela is, he says, one of the Molotov cocktails that he throws at the established order. One of the worst aspects of the heritage Spanish America received from Spain is the tendency toward excessive seriousness, the lack of a sense of humor.' Literature, he goes on, should not take itself so

.188 189

seriously. Cortcizar refers to this Hispanic seriousness as "...la

seriedad, esa senora demasiadp escuchada... "? He says:

Qui suerte excepcional la de ser un, sudamericano

. y especialmente un argentino que no se cree obligado a escribir en serio, a ser serio, a sentarse ante la mciquina con los zapatos lustrados y una sepulcral nocidn de la gravedad-del-instante. Entre las frases

. que m^s ami premon i tori amen te en la infancia figura la de un .condiscfpulo: "iQui risa. todos lloraban!" Nada mSs c6mieo que la seriedad entendida como valor -previo a toda literatura importante (otra nocidn infinitamente c6mica cuando es presupuesta), esa seriedad del que

• escribe como quien va a un velorio por obligacidn o le da una friega a un cura.^

Cortazar states that there are two proofs of Spanish America's

literary underdevelopment: one is the lack of naturalness among the

writers of the continent; the second is the lack of a sense of humor;

for humor is impossible without naturalness.® Cortcizar asks why there

is such a gulf between everyday life and literature in Spanish America.

He says that he has known many aspiring writers who would be highly

successful if they would only write as they think and as they talk, ,

laugh and joke at informal gatherings/in cafis, for example. Instead,

at the moment of writing, they revert to the foolish seriousness which

has so long characterized Spanish American literature. Then, when their

works do not sell, they attribute the failure to the snobbery of a public which prefers foreign authors over national ones, to the perversity of publishing houses, or to any number ofother reasons, without recogniz-

ing that the real reason for their failure is their own lack of natural-

ness and a sense of humor.' CortSzar cites his own humorous little

book, Historias .de cronopios y famas : when the book first appeared in

Argentina, he writes, the critics were shocked that such a "serious" 190

writer v/ould stoop to such unimportance. This foolish notion of literature's importance, he says, is one of the worst things about

Argentina. The idea of doing something just for the fun of it is practically nonexistent.*

Rayuela 's Morelli lashes out at Art and" its fossilized traditions; he recommends humor as the best destructive weapon: "...si alguien me hiclese tal objeci6n:...que yo, en vez de sujetarme a las severas reglas y cSnones del Arte, estoy. intentando burlarlas por medio de irresponsables chungas, zumbas y muecas, contestarfa -que sf, que es cierto, que justamente tales son mis prop6sitos. Y, por Dios— no vacilo en confesarlo—yo deseo esquivarme tanto de vuestro Arte, senores, como de vosotros mismos, ipues no puedo soportaros junto con aquel Arte, con vuestras concepciones, vuestra actitud artfstica y con todo vuestro medio artfstico!"^ However, for CortSzar, humor is not always frivolous and fanciful, as in Historias de cronopios y famas. We have already, seen that he is drawn to what he calls "brink situations" such as the incident

of the wooden board ( Rayuela ). Morelli states that humor in the novel should be like those dreams in which, half-hidden behind trivialities and pleasantries, we perceive graver, weightier matters which we often cannot fully discover. But we know they are there. ^^ Humor can carry us to "serious" matters: "Y asf uno puede refrse, y creer que no est5 hablando en serio, pero sf se estS hablando en serio, la risa ella sola ha cavado mois tdneles dtiles quetodas las Icigrimas de la tierra, aunque mal les sepa a los cogotudos -empecinados en creer que Melpdmene es m5s fecunda que Queen Mab."*^ 191

Cabrera Infante, the acknowledged Spanish-language master of the

pun, is, like Cort^zar,. a strong advocate of the use of humor in litera-

ture. He too rejects the serious nature that has traditionally been

accorded to Spanish American literature. When asked how he views his

own contribution to the novel, he responds: "I wish it could be seen,

not by me but by others, as the unstable foundation for some future

leaning tower of disrespect. Enough of sacred cows! In literature,

life, politics, history, and language let nothing human be considered

divine. "^^ He says he would like for his own masterpiece, Tres tristes

tigres , to be taken as a huge written joke, lasting for about five

hundred pages.. He rejects the symbolism and prophecy which some critics

have found in the book. He says: "Latin American literature errs on

the side of excessive seriousness, sometimes solemnity. It is like a mask of solemn words, which writers and readers put up by mutual consent.

TTT is intended to deflate many of these pretensions— I only hope it succeeds

"^^ and TTT becomes TNT to them. The meaning of Tres tristes tigres , he declares, is merely nonsense.^ *• Moreover, he regards humor as an access to universality. Men all over the world laugh the same, he says. And humor makes some of the book's more obscure zones more accessible to the average readei— zones which would probably be incomprehensible had they been presented in a traditional ("serious") narrative manner. Humor and the pun are central to- Cabrera Infante's novelistic theory, and he is quick to praise English literature, which he regards as the first great literature to recognize the major role that humor can and should

^^ play in literature. a

192

There, was no intention of seriousness in the writing of Cien anos de

soTedad, according to GarcTa M^rquez. He purposefully wrote it off-

handedly, casually, he says, because he was tired of the pedantry of so much of Spanish American literature, tired of so many novels whose ultimate aim was not to tell an interesting story but to overthrow a government. Such excessive seriousness, he continues, has caused the

Spanish American novelist to lose his reading public— an unpardonable sin. Only now, when writers are beginning to take their role less seriously, is the public beginning to be won back.V^

A valid point concerning humor is made by Vargas Llosa in his

discussion of Garcia M^rq-uez's El coronel no tiene quien le escriba .

The colonel of the story is really a pitiful figure, says Vargas Llosa— penniless old man, retired from the bloody civil wars of Colombia, living in misery, hunger and tedium, surviving only on the hope of his government pension, which will, never arrive. Had Garcta Mcirquez written this novel in a "serious" manner, the crude realism of the colonel's situation would probably have: been too much for the reader, to accept, and the reader's reaction would have been incredulity, as was so often the case with the traditional protest novels. The reader can easily throw up a defense mechanism (incredulity) which protects him from the accusing finger of such novels— he finds such situations "exaggerated" or

"impossible." But Garcta M^rquez softens his story with humor, which serves to cushion the shock of the old man's situation. The reader is distracted toward the humorous side of the situation and finds the colonel a human, understandable figure, deserving compassion. Thus, the reader, subconsciously perhaps, accepts the social criticism implicit in the 193

novel, but the criticism does not hurt or offend. The author's use of humor is the instrument which breaks down the barrier of in-

V' credulity. ,,

When asked why he does not use humor in his own works, Vargas

Llosa answers that he does use it, but only incidentally, like Mark

Twain. He is opposed to making humor the focus of literature.^® But in a different interview, he contradicts himself, stating:

I've always been completely immune to humor in literature It freezes things, glosses -them over. Humor is interesting when it's an expression of revolt; for instance, the insolent, corrosive humor of a. Celine.

' . It can be a way of cushioning. But in general humor is unreal.. Reality contradicts humor. Humoristic authors have never convinced me or appealed to me. And the professional humorist is a type of author who has always irritated me. I think humor can be an ingredient of fiction, as it; is of reality, but that it must always be justified ^' by the context. It mustn't be premeditated.

Vargas Llosa is, certainly not alone in his avoidance of humor. A number of contemporary authors evidently cling to the idea of literature as a

"serious" pursuit, and their works contain little humor: SSbato, Carpentier,

Rulfo and Asturias, to name a few. Nevertheless, the number of authors who claim Spanish American literature needs to be less serious is increasing, and humor certainly plays a greater role in today's novel than it did fifty years ago.

Sex

Explicit sex scenes have traditionally been taboo in Spanish American literature. Only recently have they begun to appear in some novels, and only in a limited way. Sex is still largely a missing quantity. Proof of its still-forbidden nature is the scant amount of theoretical material dealing with it. 194

Julio Cort^zar, for one, asks why Spanish American authors sidestep the question of physical love. When they deal with it, which is infrequently, they generally camouflage it behind euphemisms and circumlocutions, thus avoiding a direct encounter. Spanish

Americans are.no less aware of and Interested in sex than any other culture, Cortcizar states, and literature is capable of transmitting any human experience. Yet Spanish American writers seem to suffer .from writing paralysis the moment they face the question of sex. Cort^zar credits Lezama Lima, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa with making a beginning at tearing down the wall of hypocrisy which veils the subject, but they are exceptions. CortSzar hopes that the Spanish language will achieve liberation in the field of eroticism so that sex can be treated in literature as a normal part of life. This is not to say that erotic literature should become the norm in Spanish America, for if an author is not inclined in that direction (he points to Borges, for example), there is ho reason why he should deal with it. The problem lies 'with those authors who want to deal with the topic but cannot in any other than a euphemistic manner. Cort5zar says, that in all his writings, he has never been able to bring himself to write a certain vulgar word, although it was needed. (The fact that Cortcizar chose an erotic passage

in Rayuela for introducing -his lenguaje glfglico s^onbolized the veiled appearance of sex, and is perhaps an indication of Cortcizar 's own un- conquered inhibitions in this area.) CortSzar attributes the Spanish

Americans avoidance of the topic of sex to a fear of recognizing the erotic side of his personality— an aspect which needs expression just as much as the other facets of human existence.^" 195

The exclusion of sex from Spanish American literature is lamented

also by Vargas Llosa. Since' physical love is an. integral part of

reality, and literature is, by his definition, a verbal representation

of reality, sex is as valid a topic for literature as any other. In his

own novel La ciudad y los perros , he has sought to portray the adolescent's

growing awareness of his own sexuality— an experience which is universally

recognizable.^^ •

Taking a more existential vein, Ernesto SSba to sees the role of

sex in modern literature in a metaphysical dimension. Physical love is

the supreme attempt at human communion, although it is usually a dismal

failure. Thus, in today's novel, love takes on a sacred character.

Scibato states that if, as Unamuno said, by means of love we. find out

how spiritual the flesh can be, we also find out through love how carnal the spirit can be. Ours, is a century in which the pure spirit has been replaced by the spirit embodied in the flesh. ^^ ,

195'

NOTES

^Fuentes, La nueva novela hispahoamericana , p. 30.

^Fuentes, "Situaci6n del escri tor en America Latina," pp. 17-18.

^Gonzcilez Bermejo, Cosas de escri tores , pp. 102-103.

•Cortcizar, La vuelta al dta en ochenta mundos . p. 7.

=Ibid., p. 14.

^Ibid., p. 13.

'Ibid., p. 34.

°Harss, Into the Mainstream , p. 240.

^Cortgzar, Rayuela . p. 614.

^°Ibid., p. 454.

^^Ibid., p. 434.

^^Guibert, Seven Voices , p. 428.

^^Ibid., p. 415.

^'*"E1 sentido de TTT es el sinsentido. o nonsense. sense du non."

Albert Bensoussan, "Entrev.istas: Guillermo Cabrera Infante," Insula , -Sept. 1970, p. 4.

^^Cabrera Infante, "Las fuentes de la narraciSn," p. 42.

^^DurSn, "Conversaciones con Gabriel Garcia Mcirquez," p. 28.

.^'Vargas LTosa, Garcfa Marques : Histpria de un deicidio , pp. 328-332,

"^^GonzSTez Bermejo, op. cit., p: 86.

^^Harss, op. cit., p. 363.

^"Cortclzar, Ultimo round , pp. 143, 153-154, "primer piso."

^^Vargas Llosa et al.. An to log fa mfhima de M. Vargas ""LTosa pp. 131-133.

'^S^bato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , p. 88. CHAPTER VII

THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL

It seems fitting to end our study with some observations by the novelists concerning the future of the Spanish American novel. Jos6

Donoso, for example, warns that the novel may run the risk of becoming. a literature for minorities, fatally reducing its audience as occurred with Spanish American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century.

Donoso also cites Marshall McLuhan's theory of the mass media as a very real threat to the novel's future existence and success.^ But he also sees hope that the current "boom" will leave perhaps half a dozen or more novels which will endure the test of time. He bases his hope on the fact that the Spanish American novel is not the product of rigid, meaningless literary theories, but rather a manifestation of a particular moment in Latin America's history, which it captures and reflects in all its rich variety.^

The novelist in Latin America still has much left to say, accord-

ing to Asturias: "We can contribute an earthiness, a natural, animal

force, a violence of new blood that will enrich Western culture and

broaden man's understanding of himself." The future will bring more mature and able novelists who will bring something new, something else

to the novel, although we cannot know now what that will be.^

The future of the novel offers man hope for his own future, in

the view of Ernesto Scibato. In a world of chaos, where total war and

total destruction are ever-present possibilities, the novel must seek

197 198

a "light in the midst of the shadows," "firm ground in the midst of the

gigantic flood." Too much has been destroyed, he states, and when

reality is destruction, the novel can only represent the construction

of a new faith, for the novel is "the world of desires, of dreams and

illusions, of the reality which never was or could not be...". In the coming years, he concludes, the novel that will truly speak to men will

be the novel that offers a new, but genuine,- hope for mankind.**

CortSzar separates the future of his own novels from that of the novel as a genre. The future of his own novels is of absolutely no

importance to him— the only thing that matters is man's future.^ As

for the Spanish American novel in general , he believes that it will continue to evolve along its present lines of development, with further

restructuring of language: .

...todavta se nos escapan demasiados lugares comunes, frases hechas, cursilertas, clis^s de todo g^nero en los temas y en su tratamiento; todavta no somos lo bastante rigurosos con nuestro instrumento de trabajo, todavTa nuestras armas no estcin lo bastante afiladas. Si logramos situarnos en ese: nivel de eficacia verbal que las viejas literaturas alcanzaron al precio de una inmensa epopeya de la palabra, estaremos en condiciones de medirnos con los temas que nos propone nuestra Amirica y nuestra hora. En cambio, si consentimos, si escribimos un poco como hablamos, si seguimos siendo mis aficionados que profesionales, s61o habrci grandes novelas por excepciSn, como hasta ahora.^

In addition to the, further refinement of language, CortSzar personally looks forward to something new— the "opening" to which he refers— in the novel as well as in his understanding of human existence.

Morelli, CortSzar's literary double, has projected an ending for his own unfinished theoretical novel— a page containing a single phrase:

"En el fondo sabfa que no se puede ir mcis allS porque no lo hay." The 199

phrase is repeated all the v/ay dcwn the page, giving the impression of a solid, impenetrable wall, beyond which one cannot go. But at the bottom of the page, the word lo^ is missing from one of the repetitions of this sentence. It is like a missing brick in the wall which lets in light from the other side. It is the opening toward the unknown future which Morelli-CortSzar foresees.'

CortSzar says that the book he would like to write now will carry the experimentation of Rayuela to its final consequences. It will be a book that will probably have very few readers, because the ordinary bridges of language that the reader logically expects will have been

are reduced to a minimum. Rayuela , he says, was a first attack—there many bridges left. In this new book, he wants to create his own language, an antiliterary language, he concedes, but a language all the same. Man cannot transform himself if he does not first transform his instrument of knowledge: "The question is: can one do something different, set out in another direction? Beyond logic, beyond Kantian categories, beyond the whole apparatus of Western thought— for instance,

looking at the world as if it weren't an expression of Euclidean geometry-

is it possible to push across a new border, to take a leap into isomething more authentic? Of course I don't know. But I think it is."^ This is

the "opening" he seeks.

The concept of "figures" is one which CortSzar is pursuing as an

alternative to characters. He sees these "figures" (or constellations")

as the natural result of modern technology's dehumanization of man. He

says: 200

The concept of "figures" will be of use to me in- strumentally, because it provides me with a focus very different from the usual one in a novel or narrative that tends to individualize the characters and equip them with personal traits and psychologies. I'd like to write in such a way that my writing would be full of life in the deepest sense, full of action and meaning, but a life, action, and meaning that would no longer rely exclusively on the interaction of individuals, but rather on a sort of superaction involving the "figures" formed by a constellation of characters. I realize it isn't at all easy to explain this But as time goes by, I feel this notion of "figures" more strongly every day. In other words, I feel daily more connected with other elements in the universe, I am less of an ego-ist and I'm more aware of the constant interactions taking place between other things or beings and rnyself.^

The novel is necessary for the continuing development of Latin

American identity, declares Carlos Fuentes. He states that Latin America

still lacks a true cultural identify apart from Europe and the United

States. Latin Americans, he believes, are still too caught up in the

contemporary ethos of progress. But the day will come when Latin

Americans will share a mutual consciousness, a mutual identity, and then

the experimental contemporary novel will provide the language necessary

for expressing the new society's consciousness. Today's novel will then

be seen as the announcement of an era.^° Furthermore, he does not worry about the novelist's being made obsolete and unnecessary in a

technological world. The novel will survive because "...in a perpetually

.unfinished world, there is always something that can be said and added only through the art of fiction. "*\

Fuentes' reference to "a perpetually unfinished world" leads us to

our concluding thought. Our study cannot lay any claims to being, complete or finished. Contemporary novelistic theory is similar to 201

the open concept of "the novel, in that this body of theory can never be conclusive and all -encompassing. Today's novelists are still writing, novels and rethinking their positions on the various aspects of writing. As new novels and new theoretical statements appear in the future, there will undoubtedly be modifications in the directions that the novel is currently following, introduced by the novelists themselves.

Therefore, to try to predict the future course of the novel in any detail would be a futile effort. Our study has focused on the present moment in the novels' development, and therefore does not pretend to be definitive. j

202

NOTES

*Donoso, Historia personal del "boom" , p.| 73.

' 2lbid., pp. 110-112. ,

^Harss, Into the Mainstream , pp. 100-101.

•Sclbato, El escritor y sus fantasmas , pp. 179-180.

. ^Guibert, Seven Voices , p. 295.

^Dtaz Marttnez, "Cuatro preguntas, a Julio Cortdzar," p. 3.

^Cortclzar, Rayuela 425. , p. [

®Harss, op. cit., pp. 235-236.

^Ibid., pp. 236-237. !

^"Fuentes, La nueva noyela hispanoamericana , pp. 96-98.

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Vazquez Candel a, Euclides. "Todo el pafs se ha echado a andar" (an interview with AlejoCarpentier). Granma, April 6, 1969, p. 10. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Ernest Jackson Lunsford, Or. was born April 27, 1945, in Durham,

North Carolina. He attended elementary and secondary schools in

Roxboro, North Carolina, graduating from Roxboro High School in June,

1953, He attended Duke University, majoring in Spanish. While an under graduate, he spent two semesters at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de

San Marcos in Lima, Peru, under the auspices of Indiana University's

Junior Year in Peru program. Returning to Duke, he received his B.A. in June, 1967. He taught for a year at the Episcopal High School in

Alexandria, Virginia, before entering graduate school at Middlebury

College in Madrid, Spain. He received his M.A. degree from Middlebury in August, 1969. Between 1969 and 1971, he taught as an instructor at

Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In September, 1971, he enrolled at the University of Florida to pursue a doctoral degree in

Spanish with a minor in Latin American Area Studies. While at Florida, he held a graduate school fellowship, a teaching assistantship, and an

NDEA Title VI fellowship in consecutive years. He received his Ph.D. in August, 1974,

209 I certify that T have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms to acceptable standard:; of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Ivan A. Schulman, Chairman Graduate Research Professor of Spanish

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Irving/ R . V/ersnov/ Professor of Spanish

David Bushnell Professor of History

This dissertation was submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Spanish in the College of Arts and Sciences and to the Graduate Council, and v/as accepted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

August, 1974

Dean, Graduate School Siiiio 1262 08666 463 7